17
votes
The death of Netflix DVD marks the loss of something even bigger
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- Title
- Remember the Long Tail? It's Dead.
- Authors
- Sam Adams
- Published
- Sep 21 2023
- Word count
- 2211 words
Netflix no longer ships DVDs.
The 35,000-100,000 catalog of DVDs was a godsend for methodically-minded cinephiles like myself intent on working our way through fantastic movies that are simply unavailable on any streaming service.
Netflix refused to sell their DVD shipping business to Redbox. When Netflix first started shipping DVDs, having 500,000 subscribers was a huge success to them. Now the million subscribers of DVD.com are worse than a distraction compared to the 238 million subscribers on streaming.
Cinephiles likely aren't as profitable, watching more than our fair share of movies and shows. We also likely aren't a good predictor of streaming success.
There are a number of replacement services that are cropping up. I haven't yet tried them, as I put aside my streaming services to focus on watching as many DVDs as I could. So now I have a lot of streaming shows to watch before I go back to movies and shows only available on DVDs.
If you have rented DVDs from Netflix, you have one month left to download your data here.
If you are willing to download a windows executable from Github, you can also download Netflixes top recommendations from you here
Before streaming took over, we had a similar DVD renting service in Denmark. It's catalog was smaller but still sizeable enough and I had several great years of watching through countless classics and lesser known movies. Of course I had less control over what came in the mail and couldn't just watch whatever I wanted whenever, but unlike with today's streaming services it didn't feel limited to basically the same group of movies all the streaming services seems to be shuffling around each other. Especially older movies outside maybe the absolute biggest ones are rarely on any streaming service. Today I mostly rely in the Criterion Channel and library services.