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Netflix brought the movies to you, and with the mailed rentals came a whole other culture. It was a pressure, getting your queue in line. (Yes, I know that means getting your line in line.). The way the service worked was that you could only keep out so many movies at a time. You had to watch or send back a movie before getting the next one, and you might have been in a different mood when you listed it than when it arrived. How many of us had aspirational queues? How many of us watched intense, artistic or experimental films that we might not have finished otherwise just to be able to send them back and get the next disc of "The L Word"?
It isn't just the end of a culture that the ceasing of the Netflix DVD represents. It's also a lack of access. As behemoth as Netflix's streaming service is, it doesn't have everything. As soon as the shuttering of the DVD service was announced, fans took to social media to bemoan the movies about to be lost to us. The Daily Mail ran a list of movies that aren't available on streaming anywhere. One DVD fan told CNN, "He's determined to finish seeing every film listed in the book '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' with the help of Netflix. 'I absolutely would not have been able to find all of those movies if not for the Netflix DVD service,' Colin McEvoy said. 'I only have four movies left to go.'"
I will never forget when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" left Netflix.com. My comfort watch, the show that was always there, was suddenly not always there, not easily. You can't count on streaming to have the shows and films you want. You can't count on streaming at all, to be affordable, to work. Slate wrote in a piece earlier this year, "What if streaming goes away?"
There's a reason why adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) owns a video store in Showtime's "Yellowjackets." The cozy store is called While You Were Streaming, a pun on one of Van's beloved Sandra Bullock films, "While You Were Sleeping," whose story she tells to the girls in a pivotal moment when they're in the woods. The video store and its tangible medium is a way to hold to the actual good parts of her youth, before trauma. It's a way to hold on, period.
Alison Stine is a former staff writer at Salon. She is the author of the novels "Trashlands" and "Road Out of Winter," winner of the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.
Copyright 2024 Salon.com, LLC. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
When Colin McEvoy, a father of two from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and a self-described film fanatic, wants to watch a Bollywood film or an obscure independent movie, he often turns to Netflix -- but not its popular streaming service.
"I remember I was in high school when I first signed up for it, and the concept was so novel, I had to really convince my dad that it was a legit service and not some sort of Internet scam," said McEvoy, who uses an old Xbox 360 to play his Netflix DVDs. "Now I have friends who've seen my red Netflix envelopes arrive in the mail, and either didn't remember what they were or couldn't believe that I still got the DVDs in the mail."
Now, McEvoy is one of the DVD-by-mail holdouts mourning the service's imminent demise. On Tuesday, Netflix announced it will send out its final red envelope on September 29, 2023, marking an end to 25 years of mailing DVDs to members. The company will continue to accept returns of customers' remaining DVDs until October 27.
Introduced in 1998 when Netflix first launched, the service promised an easier rental experience than having to drive to the nearest Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. The red envelopes, which have long been synonymous with Netflix itself, littered homes and dorm rooms across the country. But in 2007, Netflix began streaming content online and gradually shifted the focus away from its original DVD business.
Today, the idea of receiving a DVD in the mail may sound almost as outdated as receiving a dial-up CD, but some longtime customers told CNN they continued to find value in the DVD option, including for its selection, pricing and added perks.
There are other factors, too. Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, said some consumers may still not have access to reliable or fast enough broadband connections, or simply prefer physical media to digital, much in the way that some audio enthusiasts still purchase and collect CDs and records. Other households may also own cars that still have DVD players inside.
For Netflix, however, the offering has made less sense in recent years. "Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members, but as the DVD business continues to shrink, that's going to become increasingly difficult," co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in a blog post this week.
Shutting down its DVD business could help Netflix better focus resources as it expands into new markets such as gaming, as well as live and interactive content. Its DVD business has also declined significantly in recent years. In 2021, Netflix's non-streaming revenue -- mostly attributable to DVDs -- amounted to 0.6% of its revenue, or just over $182 million.
The cost to operate its DVD business may also be a factor, especially as Netflix rethinks expenses broadly amid heightened streaming competition and broader economic uncertainty. "Moving plastic discs around costs far more money than streaming digital bits," said Eric Schmitt, senior director analyst at Gartner Research. "Removing and replacing damaged and lost inventory are also cost considerations."
"The inventory of available titles, while still vast, had been contracting some over the years with some movies that were once available no longer being so," Cordy said. "Turnaround times to get a new movie or movies also started to take longer, so I knew it was only a matter of time. But I didn't want it to end if I could help it."
On Wednesday, Bill Rouhana, the CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment -- which owns DVD rental service Redbox -- told The Hollywood Reporter he hopes to purchase Netflix's DVD business. "I'd like to buy it... I wish Netflix would sell me that business instead of shutting it down," he said. Redbox remains popular despite the shift in streaming but took a hit during the pandemic because of the lack of new movies and TV shows to fill the boxes.
A Netflix spokesperson told CNN it has no plans to sell the DVD business and declined to share how it plans to dispose of the discs. But Nick Maggio, a 43-year-old elementary school teacher from Valley Stream, New York, said he hopes the company will sell their individual titles. "I know there are several titles I'd like to get my hands on," he said.
McEvoy, who also subscribes to Disney+, Hulu, the Criterion channel and Mubi, said he's determined to finish seeing every film listed in the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" with the help of Netflix.
The end of an era is upon us. On April 18th, Netflix sent out a tweet which read, "On September 29th, 2023, we will send out the last red envelope. It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey, including this final season of red envelopes."
That news brought two reactions from movie watchers. You were either surprised that their DVD service still existed and that in 2023 anyone still rents DVDs, or you were heartbroken because one of our last sources of physical film media is on its way out. With that might mean the end of so many indie and foreign films that cinephiles have depended on Netflix to provide them.
In 1998, when Netflix first started their DVD mailing service, video stores were still very popular. The internet was in its early days, and we were years away from streaming. Netflix served a two-fold purpose. They were obviously convenient. If you wanted to rent a movie, but didn't have the time or energy to browse through Blockbuster, you could hop on Netflix's website, add movies to your queue, and within a day or two it would show up at your door. You could get one, two, or more at a time if you wanted and keep them as long as you wanted. Goodbye, late fees.
The other great thing about Netflix was how stacked their selection was. Blockbuster was sure to have about every popular movie you could think of, but what if you were looking for a hard to find horror movie or a foreign film? You could drive around to other video stores, even going to other cities if you were desperate enough, or you could browse Amazon and eBay, hoping to find some bootleg copy or one being sold for an astronomical amount. Netflix, however, had thousands of titles, from the newest releases, hard to find classics, and movies so rare most people had never heard of them. They allowed anyone to affordably and easily explore their film fandom in deeper ways. It opened us up to film history. For example, you could be a slasher fan and rent every Halloween and Friday the 13th movie at Blockbuster over and over again, but with Netflix, you could dig into the smaller but just as important movies like Madman, The Burning, or Black Christmas. The same went for classic film and foreign film buffs.
Even when Netflix introduced their own streaming service in 2007, which eventually blossomed into there being just as many streaming services as TV channels, the DVD service was still there, slowly shrinking in subscribers but not in content. They were still a film-obsessed fan's dream come true, especially as video stores quickly disappeared. Now Netflix's DVDs weren't just an option, they were the only option. Redbox was out there, but their limited content was reserved for new releases and a few popular slightly older films.
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