Those little red DVD envelopes from Netflix are going the way of the Betamax and free AOL CDs.
In what will come as a surprise to millions of Netflix’s subscribers, the company has still been sending people DVDs through the mail as they did in the days before streaming.
However, that will come to an end in September, the company announced Tuesday. Cue Green Day‘s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life):
“After an incredible 25-year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com [service] later this year,” Netflix announced. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members, but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult. So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023.”
The company continued, “Those iconic red envelopes changed the way people watched shows and movies at home — and they paved the way for the shift to streaming….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.”
Netflix’s retrospective continued, noting its first DVD was shipped on March 10, 1998, and it was the 1988 Michael Keaton classic Beetlejuice.
Since then, it has shipped more than 5.2 billion discs to more than 40 million subscribers.
And for the record, its most popular DVD to be shipped out was Sandra Bullock‘s Oscar-winning 2009 football family drama The Blind Side.
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