Those red-and-white envelopes with DVDs in your mailbox are about to become a thing of the past.
Netflix, which began its DVD-by-mail rental service in 1998, plans to mail its final discs in its signature red-and-white envelopes on Sept. 29, USA Today reported. The mailing of discs -- a unique concept at the time -- eventually led to Netflix introducing its revolutionary video streaming services.
“Those iconic red envelopes changed the way people watched shows and movies at home -- and they paved the way for the shift to streaming,” Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos wrote in a blog post. “To everyone who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a red envelope to arrive: thank you.”
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. pic.twitter.com/9lAntaL2ww
— DVD Netflix (@dvdnetflix) April 18, 2023
At its peak in 2010, Netflix had approximately 20 million subscribers to its DVD service, The New York Times reported. The DVD service has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the U.S., according to NPR.
The idea for mailing DVDs began in 1997, when Netflix co-founder Marc Rudolph went to a post office in Santa Cruz, California, to mail a Patsy Cline CD to company co-founder Reed Hastings, NPR reported.
Randolph was testing whether it was feasible to deliver a disc through the mail without it being damaged, hoping to do the same with the newly invented DVD, according to the news outlet.
“It was planned obsolescence, but our bet was that it would take longer for it to happen than most people thought at the time,” Randolph said in a 2022 interview.
“DVD paved the way for streaming, ensuring that so much of what we started will continue long into the future,” the company said in an earnings report on Tuesday report, according to USA Today. “We feel so privileged to have been able to share movie nights with our DVD members for so long.”
As of March 2023, Netflix had 232.5 million worldwide subscribers to its video streaming service, according to The Associated Press. It stopped disclosing how many people still pay for DVD-by-mail delivery but the service generated $145.7 million in revenue last year.
That translates to approximately 1.1 million to 1.3 million subscribers based on average prices paid by customers, according to the news organization.
“Beetlejuice” was the first DVD shipped by the company, in March 1998, Sarandos wrote in his blog post. The most frequently requested was “The Blind Side.”
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