Eagerly awaiting squarish red envelops in the postbox… meticulously re-ranking one’s “queue”… desperately searching for the matching white DVD sleeve under the cushions… These well-worn pastimes of the aughts will soon be assigned to the dustbin of nostalgia—as Netflix this month ceases its DVD-by-mail service.
The Los Gatos-based company is one of the most familiar and successful streaming services in the world, but its origins were primitive by today’s viewing standards—employing such antiquated 20th century modus operandi as DVDs, pre-paid envelops and the United States Postal Service. (Kidding, USPS; we love you.)
The company was founded in the late 1990s by techie carpool buddies Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, as they commuted to work brainstorming ways to utilize speedy online order-and-delivery services, a là Amazon. When test mailing DVDs to themselves proved cheap and durable in a way VHS tapes were not, the idea for Netflix was born. (Hastings also said getting dinged with a $40 Blockbuster late fee on an Apollo 13 rental served as inspiration.)
The service was slow growing its first couple of years, until DVDs finally replaced VHS as the dominate home-entertainment format. Initially, the business model mirrored the per-rental model of video store chains, but once they shifted to a flat monthly fee for unlimited rentals (no more than three at a time) without due dates, late fees or shipping and handling charges—the rest was history. And so were video stores.
By 2010, Blockbuster, which misguidedly held steadfast to the chain-store movie rental model, had declared bankruptcy. In 2014, it closed all its corporate-owned stores; today, a single Blockbuster franchise remains in Bend, Oregon, surviving largely as a tourist curiosity, a living museum to a typical Friday night, circa 2002. (The 2022 closings of Bette’s Flicks in San Anselmo and Joe Video in Santa Rosa marked the end of the line for video rental stores in Marin and Sonoma counties, respectively.)
Now, two decades later, DVD-by-mail goes the way of the rewind button. Turn, turn, turn.
4 thoughts on “Your DVD has arrived… for the last time ever”
I liked the old movie store going throuth the movies
I like to have blue ray disk down loading or streming rots
Your wricking the movies and music
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