Call up your Luddite loved ones and your nostalgic friends who still cherish physical media. After 25 years, Netflix is ending its DVD-by-mail business.
Before it was upending the entertainment industry and ushering in the streaming era, Netflix was a company whose business model revolved around sending DVDs through the mail in easily recognizable red-and-white envelopes. At its peak, in 2010, roughly 20 million subscribed to the DVD service. But the practice has long felt anachronistic, and the company said Tuesday that it will ship its final DVDs to customers on Sept. 29.
How many customers? Netflix doesn’t break out those numbers anymore. But whoever they are, it’s time for them to dust off any DVDs they might have lying around and send their red envelopes back to Los Gatos, California, where they can be retired to the landfills for good.
“Those iconic red envelopes changed the way people watched shows and movies at home — and they paved the way for the shift to streaming,” the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in a letter. “To everyone who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a red envelope to arrive: thank you.”
The letter also noted some DVD trivia. “Beetlejuice,” starring Michael Keaton and Geena Davis, was the first DVD shipped by the company, in March 1998. The most frequently requested was the feel-good film “The Blind Side,” starring Sandra Bullock. And the company has sent out more than 5.2 billion DVDs over the years.
The DVD announcement was part of Netflix’s earnings report for the first quarter, which illustrated how dominant streaming has become for the company. Drafting off a strong fourth quarter, when it added 7.7 million subscribers, Netflix said that revenue had risen 4% from a year earlier to $8.1 billion and that profit had hit $1.3 billion.
The company also said that its average paid memberships had increased 4% over last year, and that it had added 1.75 million subscribers. Netflix’s global subscriber base now totals 232.5 million.
But Netflix just missed its revenue guidance for the quarter and fell short of Wall Street’s expectations for new subscribers, leaving analysts concerned that it has not yet rebounded from its correction last year.This article originally appeared in .
