Netflix nights still coming wrapped in red envelopes
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Netflix’s trailblazing DVD-bymail rental service has been relegated as a relic in the age of video streaming, but there is still a steady — albeit shrinking — audience of diehards like Amanda Konkle who are happily paying to receive those discs in the iconic red-andwhite envelopes.
“When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” said Konkle, a resident of Savannah, Ga., who has been subscribing to Netflix’s DVDby-mail service, since 2005.
It’s a small pleasure that Konkle and other still-dedicated DVD subscribers enjoy but it’s not clear for how much longer. Netflix declined to comment for this story but during a 2018 media event, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings suggested the DVDby-mail service might close, around 2023.
When — not if — it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the US since its inception, nearly a quarter century ago. And it will echo the downfall of the thousands of Blockbuster video rental stores that closed because they couldn’t counter the threat posed by Netflix’s DVD-bymail alternative.
The eventual demise of its DVD-by-mail service has been inevitable since Hastings decided to spin it off from a then-nascent video streaming service, in 2011. Back then, Hastings floated the idea of renaming the service as Qwikster — a bungled idea that was so widely ridiculed that it was satirized on “Saturday Night Live.” It finally settled on its current, more prosaic handle, DVD.com.
The operation is now based in non-descript office in Fremont, Calif., located about 20 miles from Netflix’s sleek campus in Los Gatos, Calif.
Shortly before breakup from video streaming, the DVDby-mail service boasted more than 16 million subscribers, a number that has now dwindled to an estimated 1.5 million subscribers, all in the US, based on calculations drawn from Netflix’s limited disclosures of the service in its quarterly reports. Netflix’s video streaming service now boasts 223 million worldwide subscribers, including 74 million in the US and Canada.
“The DVD-by-mail business has bequeathed the Netflix that everyone now knows and watches, today,” Marc Randolph, Netflix’s original CEO, said during an interview at a coffee shop located across the street from the post office in Santa Cruz, Calif.