Netflix is ​​delivery its remaining DVD leases, marking the top of an period that helped make the corporate the streaming large it’s immediately. “Netflix will mail the ultimate DVD on September 29, 2023,” the corporate stated in a publish on X yesterday. “However the crimson envelope stays a permanent image of our love of leisure.”

Netflix introduced in April this 12 months that it might shut down its DVD rental enterprise on September 29, saying that shrinking demand for bodily leases was making it “more and more tough” to ship the standard of service you need. The corporate shipped its first disc (Beetlejuice) in 1998, and since then it has shipped 5.2 billion motion pictures in these crimson envelopes to greater than 40 million prospects.

The DVD rental service paved the way in which for Netflix to supply on-demand streaming in 2007, and shortly grew to grow to be the corporate’s hottest providing by 2009. The remaining is historical past, as Netflix regularly expanded to supply its personal streaming content material and now numbers over 238 million subscribers. In the meantime, the DVD rental service (which morphed into DVD.com) regularly turned a small a part of Netflix. And whereas videophiles nonetheless love DVDs and Blu-rays, worldwide gross sales are down 19 % from 2021 to 2022 alone. And in one of many remaining blows, Disney introduced that it was to stop DVD and Blu-ray manufacturing in Australia.

Though it’s sadly the top of an period, there’s one silver lining. Netflix introduced this summer season that anybody who nonetheless has a lease will have the ability to preserve their discs, and may order as much as 10 extra motion pictures till the corporate can liquidate its stock. “Please get pleasure from your remaining shipments for so long as you need,” the corporate stated Published on X.