Netflix's DVD business is officially dead after 25 years

The streaming giant shipped out its final red envelope this morning

By Emma Keates | September 29, 2023 | 4:39pm

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Netflix's DVD business is officially dead after 25 years

Red Netflix envelopes Photo: Justin Sullivan

A moment of silence for all those years of patiently waiting for a red envelope containing The Big Lebowski or The Notebook or The Departed or any of the other near 70,000 titles in Netflix’s unmatched DVD collection to magically show up in your mailbox. The streaming giant and Blockbuster assassin shipped out its final disc ever this morning, putting a conclusive fade-to-black on one of the last remaining great legacies in physical media.

Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service started 25 years ago, with a copy of Beetlejuice (the first disc ever shipped), a dial-up modem, and a dream. The streamer commemorated their humble origins in a blog post and video tribute today, set to a lo-fi rendition of Blink 182's “All The Small Things.” (Say it ain’t so!)

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“Thank you for loving our red envelopes, sharing countless movie nights with us at home and being part of our final season,” the post concludes, following a long info-graphic timeline depicting some of the DVD service’s greatest hits. (Shrek was, appropriately, the only non-red envelope ever shipped. The most DVDs sent in one day? A whopping 4.9 million in 2011.) No word on what the lucky, final title out the door was.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix’s DVD arm (later housed on DVD.com) still accounted for about a third of the company’s total revenue as late as 2012. That number has steadily declined in the years since.

Still, the mega-streamer has been incredibly darling about this whole shut-down process, as if they weren’t the ones to sign the DVD era’s death warrant themselves by pivoting to streaming in 2007. A billboard put up by the company spelling out the words “DVDs will always be in our DNA” with real, now unusable discs serves as a tidy little metaphor for this changing of the guard. No word from the company yet on what will happen to the rest of the massive collection, but hopefully this veritable Library of Alexandria will suffer a slightly better fate.