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The DVDs were never the point. Even in 1998, when the company mailed its first DVD — the 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice, in case you’re wondering — it was already imagining a world without discs. The company was called Netflix, after all, not DVDsByMail. It started a streaming service practically as soon as internet bandwidth would allow and bet everything on the internet being much more powerful than physical media. It was extremely right.
Now, Netflix is officially getting out of the DVD business. The company announced along with its quarterly earnings that it is planning to shutter DVD.com, which is the new name for its DVD-by-mail business. (You might remember when Netflix tried to spin out this business under the name Qwikster, which remains one of the worst product names of all time and lasted all of about a week. But the less we talk about Qwikster, the better.) It will ship its last discs on September 29th, and I have a sneaking suspicion you won’t need to return them.
This is an obviously good business decision, at least for a company like Netflix. The DVD business was once worth many billions of dollars annually but has cratered over the last decade: Blu-ray and DVD sales and rentals were about a $6.5 billion global business in 2021, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which sounds like a lot of money but is less than half what it was even five years ago. In the US, the digital entertainment market is estimated to be about 10 times bigger than the physical media market.
“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. Sure, if you’re Redbox, there’s money to be made in renting DVDs. But there’s a lot more money in streaming. Even Redbox is a streaming service now.
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