Every collector has to say good-bye to their physical media at some point. Netflix’s DVD business started in 1997, buried Blockbuster, and put the company on the map, but after a quarter-century of mailing out red envelopes, co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced that it’s killing its disc operation this year. “After an incredible 25-year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com,†he wrote. “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.â€
Netflix subscribers on Twitter reacted almost immediately to the news, whether to recall how they’d used it to rent and watch full seasons of The Wire one disc at a time, to jokingly threaten that they were going to burgle the vast movie library, or to highlight the fact that Netflix’s DVD business was a way to get movies that weren’t licensed to its streaming service. For years after “Netflix Instant Watch†evolved into the standard Netflix streaming offering and became the company’s backbone, the DVD-rental plan existed as an optional add-on. It will wind down entirely before the end of the year, and the service will ship out its final discs on September 29, 2023. No word yet on whether Netflix will come after you if you hold onto its DVDs after that date, but after years of hanging onto a physical copy of the 2010 Denzel Washington movie Unstoppable, Blockbuster still hasn’t knocked on my door.