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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

Blockbuster did not mail directly to the customer at any point that I can remember. I think OP has it correct.

They did in fact have a DVD by mail service. It came out a year or two after Netflix ate their lunch. You could also return the disks at your local Blockbuster for a quicker turnaround. It was too little to late to save the company.

Blockbuster (in the UK, at least) started doing DVDs-by-post since at least 2007 (probably earlier…) to compete with companies like LoveFilm that did DVDs-by-post since 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoveFilm

Doing DVDs-by-post makes sense (makes cents?) because their mailing cost is negligible and library operations can likely be fully-automated - and low media-costs mean damaged, lost, and unreturned media won’t materially affect the business.

VHS-by-post, on the other hand, has issues:

* Large bulky media will cost far more to mail because it can’t be handled by existing postal equipment for letters/envelopes.

* Tape signal damage caused by EM fields - I don’t expect 1970s/1980s post office equipment to have much EM shielding.

* VHS picture quality is awful: people subscribed to HBO instead.

* Handling: DVD libraries are automated thanks to barcodes and robots - both of those things weren’t really ready to build a VHS-by-mail library. Not to mention needing to rewind tapes.

Which is why the inconvenience of the customer waiting for a mailed rental would be a foobared, inconvenient prototype of Blockbuster that never happened, compared to the real one where you just get the item over the counter and take it home to watch.

Mailing DVD rentals was literally what Netflix did before the advent of web streaming in the mid to late 2000s. They could offer a wider selection than Blockbuster, and people generally find it more convenient to sit around at home instead of putting on pants and going to their local video rental store.

While web streaming becoming popular (and the selection available for streaming becoming much wider) definitely dealt a killing blow to Blockbuster, Netflix was already successful with their mail-in rental service, and had made a name for themselves with it.

From what I understand, Netflix always intended to get into streaming. The DVD by mail thing was just a stopgap while the technology improved.

https://dvd.netflix.com/

Like this? AKA, the "original" Netflix.

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