The newsiest part of this story may be that Netflix has continued to mail DVDs to customers as a subscription service. The development, however, is that the company is officially ending the red-envelope-in-the-mail part of its business.
Physical media from Netflix was such a relic in 2011 that company leadership proposed rebranding the DVD rentals to Qwikster. The Twitter handle @qwikster was occupied by a random dude at the time who had no intentions of letting it go. Qwikster lost a million subscribers over the weird name and a price increase, and the branding plan from another planet was canceled.
Still, the service that was the origin of Netflix lived on for another dozen years. Eventually “DVD.com, a Netflix company” was born.
To recap, Netflix killed Blockbuster with its no due dates or late fees DVD business, then Netflix killed its own movie rental business, and now the remnants of what kickstarted Netflix as we know it today have now gone.
As for the specifics, Netflix says it will ship its last DVD on September 29, 2023. Discs that haven’t yet been returned will be accepted through October 27. The company does have a tool for DVD subscribers to download data about their rental history:
Many of our members have years of movie-watching memories with DVD Netflix, so we are providing a downloadable PDF copy of your data with information about your queue, rental history, ratings, and reviews in our Data Download.
At any time up until Oct 27, 2023 a current DVD subscriber or former DVD customer whose DVD subscription was canceled within the past 9 months may download their data, via our Data Download (https://dvd.netflix.com/Download), which includes:
- Your queue
- Your rental history
- Your ratings
- Your reviews
And in an FAQ answering why the disc rental service is closing, the company says it expects it to be “increasingly difficult” to offer the best DVD experience while the business shrinks.
“Making 2023 our Final Season allows us to maintain our quality of service through the last day and go out on a high note,” says the company.
Better to have your business eaten by yourself than the competition, right iPod?
Netflix, which says it plans to bring a password-sharing plan to the US soon, is also increasing streaming resolution on its new ad-supported plan. For the $6.99/month service, subscribers can now access 1080p video and two concurrent streams. That’s up from 720p, something YouTube no longer considers HD, and no concurrent streams.
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