Results: Netflix Ends the Red Envelope

Netflix's DVD business was once so big it was 1.3 percent of all US mail. In 1998, when the company mailed its first DVD — the 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice, in case you're wondering. The company shipped over 5.2 billion DVDs from 20 main genres and 530 subgenres to over 40 million unique subscribers over the years. Did you ever subscribe to Netflix?

This is an obviously good business decision, at least for a company like Netflix. The DVD business was once worth many billions of dollars annually but has cratered over the last decade: Blu-ray and DVD sales and rentals were about a $6.5 billion global business in 2021, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which sounds like a lot of money but is less than half what it was even five years ago. In the US, the digital entertainment market is estimated to be about 10 times bigger than the physical media market. Do you still watch television or movies on DVDs ?

The end of DVD.com still marks the end of an era. It's easy to forget now, but when Netflix first launched, the fact that you could log in, slide a movie to the top of your queue, and that movie would appear on your doorstep a couple of days later felt like magic. DVDs were not hard to find at the time! But Netflix got rid of late fees, didn't make you put on shoes to return things, and never seemed to be out of your favorite flick. It belongs in the history books with Gmail's seemingly infinite storage, Amazon's two-day shipping, and the first time you pressed a button in the Uber app and a car appeared. It was a moment when technology made an everyday thing suddenly and forever better. Do you think Netflix changed the way we rented entertainment?

"On September 29th, 2023, we will send out the last red envelope," Netflix said in a tweet on Twitter. "It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey, including this final season of red envelopes." I know my kids would fight over whose disc got to be sent first. It was always exciting to get that red envelope. Do you think DVDs will go the way of VHS and become obsolete?