In a blog post on Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos explained the business had continued to shrink, making it increasingly difficult to justify offering the service. “We want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on 29 September 2023,” Netflix. Netflix was founded in 1997 and started out as a DVD rental and sales business in the US. In March 1998, it started allowing customers to place orders on its DVD.com website for 925 movies and have them mailed to their preferred address. Within a year of launch, Netflix dropped the sales component and focused purely on rentals. Initially, it only offered a per-rental rate similar to what was on offer from brick-and-mortar DVD and VHS rental stores. In September 1999, it launched a monthly subscription that removed due dates and fees for late returns, handling, and shipping. This became the only option by the early 2000s.
In 2007, Netflix introduced its on-demand video streaming service in the US, expanding to Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As the service grew in popularity, South Africans accessed it for several years through VPNs or smart DNS proxies before its global launch in 2016. Sarandos said the “iconic” red envelopes in which Netflix shipped DVDs changed the way people watched movies and TV shows at home, paving the way for the shift to streaming. “From the beginning, our members loved the choice and control that direct-to-consumer entertainment offered: the wide variety of the titles and the ability to binge-watch entire series,” Sarandos said. “DVDs also led to our first foray into original programming — with Red Envelope Entertainment titles including Sherrybaby and Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion.” In the 25 years that the DVD service has been available, Netflix has shipped over 5.2 billion titles and amassed 40 million unique subscribers. The first DVD shipped to a customer was Tim Burton’s horror comedy Beetlejuice, starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. The most popular title in the service’s history was John Lee Hancock’s biographical sport drama The Blind Side.
