Posted on 04/22/2023 11:31:15 AM PDT by upchuck
Netflix has announced it is ending its DVD rental service after 25 years.
DVD rentals formed the basis of Netflix’s original business model when the company launched in 1998. It initially had 925 titles available, and the first it ever sent out was a copy of Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy Beetlejuice.
Netflix’s rise helped cause the downfall of stores like Blockbuster, before it began transitioning into streaming in the mid-2000s.
DVD rentals accounted for $126m (£101m) of Netflix’s $31.6bn (£25.4bn) revenue last year – equivalent to just 0.4 per cent.
The company announced $8.18bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2023 – slightly lower than than analysts had forecast. However, it did add 1.75 million subscribers, after losing more than 1 million in the first six months of 2022.
Netflix is planning to increase revenue by introducing adverts, as well as cracking down on password sharing – though this has been delayed until June.
“While this means that some of the expected membership growth and revenue benefit will fall in Q3 rather than Q2, we believe this will result in a better outcome from both our members and our business,” the company said.
"... So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023."
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Note tha Cinema Paradiso, a British firm, offers a similar service.
https://www.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/
As a Netflix rental customer since 2006, I will miss their service. But I will check out Cinema Paradiso.
This stinks
I love watching good blu-ray quality movies at home. Is Red Box all that is left? Are there any other companies that will send Discs to the house?
Netflix should kill itself for “Cuties” alone...
Well, the end of an era, as technology advances, is what this story is about.
I’m sure the DVD rentals declined, as so many people are into streaming nowadays. Why rent a DVD and wait for it to be mailed to you, when you can watch it tonight on a streaming service?
Kudos to them for making a successful transformation from delivering physical media to streaming.
Most companies can’t make the turn to new business models like that.
This is devastating for me because I really enjoy watching older, often obscure, movies that are not in any streaming catalogs. Or, if they are, they disappear for unknown reasons.
It looks like I’ll have to be spending more time borrowing discs from the library and buying used discs on eBay.
I just borrowed “Brokedown Palace” yesterday from our library. It was not available on Netflix streaming or DVD. This movie was mentioned and discussed here on FR a week or two ago and looks intriguing.
How much will the postal service be raising their rates to make up for the loss in revenue from Netflix?
I used Vudu.com as my streaming service for many classic movies. They have an incredible selection, including the “Brokedown Palace” movie you mentioned.
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Most of the movies made over the past 100 years are not available via streaming. A great many good movies, if not most, are on DVD but are not streamed online.
Woke companies are also now editing old movies digitally to make them more woke. This is a really bad situation.
It's a smaller market but it's still a market.
True. As an early user of Netflix, I did not see streaming as viable because of the slow internet speeds at the time. But they positioned themselves well as broadband internet spread across the country. I still remember how awesome it was getting my first iPad and streaming movies on it.
I wonder whatever happened to Redbox? I used to see their kiosks at all the supermarkets.
See post #2. Note also that this info is in the original article.
Please note that libraries will be discontinuing their CD collections, because most administrators look only at circulation numbers. What the front line staff think rarely matters. Contact the library administrators formally now before they go that. Get together petitions. Explain that they, the publicly funded library, are the only source for the public to borrow these prized titles because they are not available in the streaming formet from anyone. Remember the history of the discontinuation of Beta Max in libraries, followed by the history of VHS in libraries. Libraries today all pay for the very same couple of big corporation subscriptions of online streaming of politically-correct, “woke” titles - this for adults, teens, and children. Publishing and librarianship are overwhelmingly dominated by Leftist group think. The uniformity and cherry picked selection of titles should alarm everyone. The range and choice of titles are being made elsewhere, under Leftist corporate aegis.
Netflix had one warehouse in California when I signed up. Shipping was actually pretty quick to GA, 2 days was common, no more than 3 days. I would go online to my account and check the box that a DVD was on the way back, and they would mail out the next DVD in my queue.
I like the idea of physical media, I like the idea of actually owning a hard copy of a movie. However, so much of what the wife and I watch are series, not movies, and with streaming it’s a lot easier to watch the next episode, or switch between series without fooling with the Blu-Ray player.
Sounded like a great idea at the time and Google had the resources to actually do it.
A big squawk was made at the time and the project halted. We haven't heard much about it since. I wonder if Google was "gotten to" by the powers that be - who certainly have a vested interest in controlling what the masses see and don't see.
Thanks. I have not tried Vudo. I presume you need a paid subscription to avoid ads? I cannot STAND adverts.
I made a recipe last night and the page was so filled with ads I couldn’t find the ingredients or instructions. I’ve got three ad blockers on my Safari browser, but none of them work anymore. The Brave browser does a pretty good job blocking ads, though.
Make me pay and have ads????
Next
Our library uses the “Kanopy” streaming service for libraries, so I can see a day in the future when they will argue they need to offer movies exclusively through that. But, like other services, it has a limited library.
I thought the Internet was going to bring us ALL of the world’s information on demand. It isn’t working out that way.
Sept 23rd. They already sent the emails. It’s gonna be weird. Watching Netflix DVDs has been my most frequent Saturday activity since I signed up in like 98 or so. But, this was always the goal. There’s a reason the company is called NetFlix, not DVD mail. The mailer business was just to make them rich while building the tech for the stream. And physical media is dying.
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