Netflix Ships Last DVD | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Ships Last DVD

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Recent and related:

Netflix prepares to send its final red envelope - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37632096 - Sept 2023 (282 comments)

I maintained my disc sub to the bitter end. Although I rarely used it, it was frequently the only way to view many older or more obscure films without an outright full-retail-price purchase, and even then, good luck on availability. I lament its passing and worry very much that it's function as a pseudo-film library for the average person is no longer available anywhere.

I hear the high seas calling...

Genuinely curious whether there were films you found on the DVD service that were inaccessible via your local library loan system (if you are in the US that is, did Netflix ever do the DVD service outside the US though?)

Good library systems have a good percentage of DVD released films readily available for free.

I'm in a fairly rural area. Our library system doesn't have much. However, just across the county line is a much more populated county with a lot more ... of everything in their library system. Turns out I can 'join' their library for $25/year. It's somewhat more convenient, because it's about an 8 minute walk from my office, and open more. The local one to my home has cut back hours. I'd like to find a way to 'support' my local library system more, but short of donating tens of thousands to them on my own, there's not much I can do. I've started to use them some more (which may help activity numbers for future budgets) but the $25/year access nets me probably 10x as much stuff.

There has only been one film I've been unable to find in our library system. It's an out of print foreign film and impossible to buy new or stream so I periodically would check eBay. Finally I found a copy at a good price and bought it.

The seller sent me a DVD-R in a case with an inkjet printed cover. I went out of my way not to pirate it and ended up doing so anyway. :(

In general though, our library has completely replaced Netflix for our house for ages. It's great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always:_Sunset_on_Third_Street

I had a Netflix DVD subscription for years, but cancelled it more than a decade ago. I found even then that most of the obscure / out of print / hard to find DVDs were simply being stolen by the people who rented them and it would just sit on your queue forever. Since these were out of print they could not be replaced and eventually would be removed from their catalog.

There are of course many movies on DVD that have not been released on streaming or Blu-Ray, I suppose the size of your local library system could make a big difference on what is available. Especially if you live in a more rural or remote area.

Yes the films are available through my local public library system, and yes they are "free" to borrow. However it is neither convenient nor reliable to borrow a film from my library. Would I pay the library $10/month to be as convenient and available as Netflix was? Yes.

Discoverability will also be an issue, I really liked getting into the more obscure parts of the dvd library and found many many titles that I would have otherwise never seen or heard of.

I got my last one yesterday. I will be off to ebay and a few other stores to get them. On ebay there are people who sell 100 dvd sets for 100 bucks.

Wonder how many people dumped their collection because 'i can always get it from netflix'.

Many. I know several in my friends group that tried to offload theirs when streaming became mainstream. I had thought about it but couldn't get enough to justify getting rid of all of them. As things are getting pulled off streaming and some films never making it (Dogma), I'm glad I kept them

> I hear the high seas calling...

I found that the high seas are only good for popular films, and that obscure films are very hard to find. I've had better luck at the library.

You're in the wrong ocean sailor. Hoist your anchor and sail towards the large scale plex appboxes. They regularly have over 30k whales breaching the briny deep and a hearty request system to track down those rare guppies as well.

Ay sailor, I seem to have lost my map, and I can't find your post address. Maybe you can post me with the location of the treasure.

You have to find the right communities.

Pass me the popcorn while we wait for them to find the right places.

I live in a mid-sized Canadian city, and the collection of DVDs and Blurays available from the city library system is impressive. A fair bit of obscure/older films, as well as new releases, and you can always request that they add titles to their collection if they are missing something.

For me it's super convenient as I can request that they send a copy (found anywhere in their system) to my local library, and I can bike over to pick it up a few days later.

I've been predicting the return of blockbuster for a couple of years for this very reason

it's incredible that a million user business wasn't deemed worthy of maintenance. mega corp churn is incredible.

Wondering if someone can pick up that market gap.

RedBox undoubtedly will. It's not quite the same service, but definitely aimed at the same consumers.

Lots more logistics involved with physical compared to streaming. Time is zero sum, you they could of had a small profit off the 1 million users but they probably found the focusing on other lines of business would be more profitable or less of a hassle.

you're not wrong, but it's just crazy to me. They could've decided to do just 4K UHD Blu-Rays and charged $30 a month. There are niche's to be found. Like you said the opportunity cost is huge and so here we are.

From an outsiders perspective it's just incredible, though.

It's speculated that the remaining business was slipping out of profitability without an overhaul. Users were dropping, movie selection is expensive to maintain, and distribution staff/centers ate the remaining revenue.

I bet it had a lot to do with those sticking around actually being the ones who use the service the most.

Similar to how gyms count on a decent chunk of members coming once a month or even less, but those members basically subsidize the $10/m price for everyone else.

Netflix DVDs could be ripped and shared via P2P with ease.

Netflix DRM playback is harder to deal with.

Is this true? A friend tells me that torrents for new episodes of ongoing stream-only shows are typically up within minutes to hours of being released.

Life finds a way.

I can confirm that. We must have the same friend.

Both are true. There is more significant DRM on most streaming services than DVD, but also pirates are still consistently beating it. Hard to say if that had much of an impact on this decision though.

I highly doubt Netflix DVDs were a high source of P2P rips. By the time something's available on DVD, it's already been ripped by scene groups from pre-release sources.

If anything, DVD ripping probably helped Netflix, as subscribers used it to build their own private archives.

This is a meaningless statement without knowing if it was profitable. If I started a streaming service that gave you $100 when you signed up I would get a million users. So do you want to buy that business from me?

Is that what happened with Netflix?

The business was shrinking and shrinking, and I don't see any meaningful growth in that area. If you know that one of your business avenues is eventually going down do a level where it makes no money (or might even start losing money since warehouses, personnel, logistics, dealing with delinquent non-returns, etc. all cost money to run) - why would you maintain it?

If someone believes there is still value in it, they can try filling it, but the only other player I see in that market is Redbox (whose business model is kiosks rather than postage), and they probably don't need anything Netflix has to offer.

As much as I dislike the modern tech/business sector, I think this makes perfect sense, even though I have a lot of nostalgia for it, so many good memories from the DVDs I rented over a decade ago.

That all sounds like a press release.

> The business was shrinking and shrinking

Was that the problem, though, or was it just that it wasn't as profitable as the streaming business? The last most of us knew, the DVD business was still profitable.

https://marketrealist.com/2019/08/is-netflixs-dvd-business-p...

> If someone believes there is still value in it, they can try filling it

Hard to build up all of the catalog, infra, etc. that DVD.com had. And even though there were buyers, Netflix would not sell.

https://www.cinemablend.com/streaming-news/netflix-turned-do...

The real story is probably about big corporate agendas being set by the market, which demanded higher profits on everything of a hulking company than a tiny niche business could produce. That combined with a desire to not bleed IP by spinning the DVD business off to be its own success.

Anti-trust laws ought to keep these things from happening.

This video brings back lots of nostalgia. I had the chance to tour the shipping facility in Fremont, and see all those machines in action. It was amazing how many disks they could process, and how much innovation was there.

They had machines that could verify the checksum of the disk in three seconds by reading the entire thing with multiple laser heads. They had machines that would OCR the sleeve and mark it for replacement if it was too dirty.

They had printers that could print the entire address on the envelope in about 300ms using multiple offset print heads, so that the sorters could run at full speed.

I wonder what will happen to all those machines. I know that sometimes they allowed bulk mailers to rent the envelope printers/sorters in the afternoons, I wonder if they'll just sell those to bulk mailers.

> They had machines that could verify the checksum of the disk in three seconds by reading the entire thing with multiple laser heads.

I would love to be able to buy such a drive, would be great to rip all my old discs.

I don't think the machines could save the data. They just loaded into RAM, took the checksum, compared it to the known good checksum, and then moved on.

This is pretty sad, not because of nostalgia, but because the Netflix DVD catalog was oftentimes the only way to watch some movies. I'm not even talking about super obscure movies - I'm talking about movies that weren't necessarily blockbusters, but were moderately successful and had big-name actors.

Many of those movies aren't available on any streaming platform, but also the DVDs are hard to buy, so the Netflix DVD catalog was the only (legal) way to watch them if you wanted to.

Soon many great films will be lost forever. Many already are.

Just look at the various films that have been lost to fire over time. Of course with the old ones piracy wasn’t really an option. Digitization has its own issues as well.

I’m referring specifically to great films that cannot be watched any more due to no access by audiences in any watchable form, even if the film still exists and is in tact.

At a certain point of DRM-encumbrance, media piracy is the only way to preserve media.

This is why I keep a handful of old torrents alive in perpetuity.

If you’re looking for it, just be patient for me to turn on my client every few weeks.

The real question is: What was the last DVD shipped?

I assume it was actually the last batch shipped.

I suppose they could have figured out the last fulfilled order though.

Right, I guess I should have specified which DVD was shipped with the last incremental order ID?

I was hoping to learn this too.

We're left to speculate.

...But I hope it was Weird Al's first film, "UHF".

"Inside the last-ever red envelope that we shipped out was… the Blu-ray disc of True Grit (2010)."

https://twitter.com/dvdnetflix/status/1707771256039428513

:-( I've been a subscriber nearly from the start and I've watched hundreds of movies via this service. It is a tragedy simply because so much content is not available any other way or a myriad of disparate streaming services that I am not going to subscribe to. There was a good article about this topic in the WSJ from a few months ago [0]. As the article states:

"This month the Washington Post’s Ty Burr reminds us of some movies we can’t stream: “Cocoon” (1985), directed by Ron Howard, “Short Cuts” (1993) by Robert Altman, “New York, New York” (1977) by Martin Scorsese, “Henry & June” (1990) by Philip Kaufman and “Silkwood” (1983) by Mike Nichols."

The only silver lining is I am probably going to start exploring the Kanopy catalog more which may be available via your local public library.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/dvds-demise-leaves-many-films-g...

Is anyone else unreasonably upset that they didn't reveal which the last shipped disc actually was?

I thought the Graphic showed "Rocketman." Did I read that wrong?

I read it as Rocketman being from 2019 when they "rocketed to 5 billion shipped".

I tried to make a graph of the total number of discs shipped from the timeline, eventually I got lazy and just did a search to see if someone else already had that graph. Instead, I found this graph that breaks down the revenues by DVDs versus streaming:

https://www.statista.com/chart/29775/netflix-revenue/

Well, who got the last DVD? Do they have to return it? What movie was it?

They said their last shipment is a gift to the subscribers. They even had a signup period where they’d give you 10 of them, sadly I missed that email. Thanks spam!

I wonder if it's possible to buy any extra stock DVDs/BDs that Netflix may have left over.

They were giving them away to their DVD subscribers -- unclear how much of their catalog it actually represented.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/netflix-will-let-you...

For me this is like when someone famous yet really old dies and the first thought is, "Wow, they were still alive?"

I'm honestly surprised there was a viable DVD business that lasted this long.

I do actually miss some of the moments of strolling through my neighborhood video store with my brother and discovering staff-pick movies an algorithm would never put in front of me today. Heck, there were some days where the browsing of movies on shelves was more satisfying than watching the actual pick at home later.

Neflix DVDs became a total lifesaver for me when I originally binged BSG. I became a solid fan at the time.

I am pretty sure I still have some dvd's and/or blu-rays somewhere that got included in a move and never unpacked... Now they will just become historical artifacts of a bygone physical-media era

I still buy everything I like and want to ever watch again on physical media. I try to get the DVD/Blu-ray combos.

I think it’s worth it even if it’s available on D+ or whatever other platform. And I can rip them and stream them myself. Which I sometimes do for trips.

I think while a little tedious sometimes, it’s worth it.

I hate the Everything-For-Rent world we live in today.

I get that, but physical media is still a pain in the ass to manage.

I too have ripped physical media in the past for my own convenience. These days, I just use a third party torrenting service ;) (I do try to have legal access to the given media first)

If there was a way to purchase data outright (or the rights to it) that wasn't copyable (sort of like a bitcoin or ethereum token for a single copy of some data, stored on some kind of shared ledger... which I believe is what the "contracts" crypto idea was about, except hasn't really taken off yet), this advantage of physical media would go away. (It would still have other advantages, though, such as anonymity, make-your-own-tuned-rip, zero dependence on outside services such as contract authentication ledgers, etc.)

I am historically a data hoarder and old system emulation enthusiast, these are obviously legal gray areas

Sad day honestly. Been a long time subscriber, almost sure since the beginning.

The variety is just larger than the streaming platforms. And to be honest while they tracked the DVDs you rented you never felt you had this bird on your back watching your every move.

On streaming you might try something, get through half way of it, give up, and next thing you know the platform thinks it’s your most favorite thing, and starts shoveling “things you may like” while thing you hated sits in the “continue watching” for the next two months.

So, anyway, happy customer. Sorry to see it go.

Back in the day, when being a cable cutter was a badge of a pioneer - I have to admit that in all the excitement I never realized that switching to streaming digital content means never having access* to “your collection” - available catalog always changes. Doesn’t matter how old the content is - someone is always busy thinking of a ways to monetize it, which usually translates to it not being available when you want to watch it.

* unless one blackbeards it

I haven't cut off all "digital streaming" but I personally definitely bucket things into "things I may want to see later" versus things I don't. Some things are just intrinsically disposable content, e.g., once you've seen Survivor Season X, you're probably not going to watch it again. (And, if you are one of the people for whom that is not the case, well, by all means, change your personal categorization, rather than arguing with me.)

I still buy things I may want to see again. And since I'm still using DVDs I bought 20 years ago, I know that that can happen. Many of them are simply not available on streaming. Others are, but would involving chasing subscriptions hither and yon, and more than once I've done that, only for the content to not actually be there when I finally got to wanting it.

Also, I will say, music I am still buying. Purchasing MP3s is acceptable, if anyone will sell them to me, but I want to own anything I really care about. For any given CD I have no real confidence that anything but my physical possession (converted to MP3 and backed up) will still be there in 20 years.

It’s crazy that we saw the birth and demise of a technology in our lifetime.

Is it? I mean, I remember when VCR recorders first came out. Though they still exist, I don’t know anyone that owns one and I can’t go to the local store and buy one. What about zip drives? Floppy disks? 8 track players in the car?

Not sure if accurate, but according to this https://movies.mxdwn.com/feature/is-buying-dvds-and-blu-rays....

"DVDs still conquer the market within those sales, and at their peak, DVD sales were over $18 billion, while Blu-Rays made just over $2 billion in a year."

This was pretty much inevitable ever since 2016, when they expanded from a few (mostly English-speaking) countries to basically the whole world, with a few exceptions.

I wonder if Netflix will sell their older dvds.

I remember when video stores went under, I brought a lot of vhs tapes, a few that never got launched on dvd or blueray.

What happens to all of the remaining DVDs? Surely Netflix has enough to fill a warehouse or two?

'Please don't send those back, as it costs us extra monies. Kthxbyeee!'

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