It’s official. As of September 29, Netflix will be a 100% streaming service, no longer renting discs by mail. This leaves what’s left of the physical media rental market to the Redbox kiosks.
The DVD division has shrunk over the years (it had $146 million in revenue in 2022, and $183 million in revenue in 2021, down from $239 million in 2020, and in Q1 of this year it took in $32 million, suggesting a further fall).
There was a local video rental business in a neighboring town that I used after moving here. The owner was a smart guy, and an excellent manager. Having no interest in video games himself, he made them a large part of his business nonetheless, and we rented more video games than DVD’s. The owner saw what was coming with Netflix and he sold the business in 2003.
The new owner was a “film person.” He wasn’t interested in video games either, but unlike the original owner he didn’t rent them. Then he removed the convenient drop-off box in the center of my town. This made late fees more likely, and after that stupid move he raised the late fees to a punitive level. The last straw for me was that the kids he hired to work behind the counter were obnoxious jerks. So I gave up, signing up for Netflix in early 2004.
When Blu-ray came along, I was surprised by how frequently they arrived from Netflix with damage that caused playback errors. Some of them were unplayable with scratches that would have had no effect on playback if they’d been on a DVD. This was surprising to me, after reading about the care that had gone into making the Blu-ray format even more durable than DVD. It certainly wasn’t. It’s been six years since I ended my Netflix disc subscription.
P.S. How’s that for a post title? Combining “cut the cord” with Discord, the video gamer hangout where that idiot kid leaked top secret government documents. They were made available to him by idiot intelligence officials who apparently learned nothing from the Edward Snowden case.