“It's sad,” longtime Netflix DVD subscriber Amanda Konkle said Thursday as she waited the arrival for her final disc, “The Nightcomers,” a 1971 British horror film featuring Marlon Brando. “It's makes me feel nostalgic. Getting these DVDs has been part of my routine for decades.”
The DVD service, in contrast, brought in just $146 million in revenue last year, making its eventual closure inevitable against a backdrop of that has forced Netflix to whittle expenses to boost its profits. In 1997, DVDs were so hard to find that when they decided to test whether a disc could make it thorough the U.S. Postal Service that Randolph wound up slipping a CD containing Patsy Cline's greatest hits into a pink envelope and dropping it in the mail to Hastings from the Santa Cruz, California, post office.
Along the way, the red-and-white envelopes that delivered the DVDs to subscribers' homes became an eagerly anticipated piece of mail that turned enjoying a “Netflix night” into a cultural phenomenon. The DVD service also spelled the end of Blockbuster, which went bankrupt in 2010 after its management turned down an opportunity to buy Netflix instead of trying to compete against it.