Any Netflix subscribers still getting DVDs/Blu Rays in the mail?
Due to the greater availability of titles I’ve gotten back to doing mail-order DVDs/Blu Rays.
Do you think there’s any future in this service or is it fading fast?
I never stopped being a member of the traditional DVD-by-mail service. I think I’ve been getting discs from them for at least fifteen years. I did add the streaming service for a while but dropped that. I think the first-sale doctrine means that there will always be a place for the traditional service, as long as new stuff is released on physical media (although I expect that less and less will be).
I dropped the discs years ago.
I think Netflix will keep it going as long as large parts of the US don’t have decent broadband. Netflix still has 2.7 million DVD subscribers, mostly from rural America. It is still making money. I read over $200 million last year.
Chart of declining subscribers since 2011. The big drop has already happened, now it is slow.
Basically you have rural subscribers without decent broadband and you have people that want the huge selection to supplement their streaming services. The subscriber loss keeps getting smaller. I would think Netflix would keep running the DVD service for another 3-5 years and sell off the remains of it after that if they can even find a buyer…
In winter when I have more movie time, yes. I simply prefer to devote 90 minutes to two hours to watch a film rather than binge watch some Netflix original that requires hours and usually has so many characters that it’s exhausting.
I stop as we head to summer and fall when I’m busy more of the time and have baseball and football.
Another vote for discs. I stream too, but it’s still annoyingly clunky/balky when trying to skip, FFW, pause or RW.
I don’t get the disks anymore, but I think I’m still paying for the service.
Man, I LOVED the disc service. I remember when they first announced they were axing/changing the disc service (I was still a disc subscriber at the time) and I was super mad. The disc service is great because their library is IMMENSE. At that time it was waaaay bigger than the streaming service. If you remove all of the custom Netflix content, I’m sure the disc service library is still tons bigger.
My favorite thing was that they had all movies listed on the site, whether it was released yet or not. So you could see a trailer for a new movie that was coming out, decide you want to see it when it comes out, go to Netflix and put it in your queue and as soon as it came out on DVD it would get sent to you.
Sadly, I stopped having enough free time to watch movies, and they ended up pricing the disc option higher than I felt I could get my money’s worth. I still have the streaming option, but it’s a shared account with the rest of my family so it’s cheaper per person. Also I rarely watch full movies on Netflix, I do more shows and admittedly, original content.
I actually tend to watch full movies more on Amazon, where I can pay $4 to rent them some time after they come out. That’s my preferred way to watch movies these days.
Good on you folks who still do discs and have time to watch them!
This was me for the longest time. Two discs sitting in a drawer for probably half a year while paying for the service. I cancelled and returned them a few months ago.
I’m just finding we’re not watching that many movies compared to series these days. And the more “timeless” movies are often on one of the streaming services we subscribe to anyway. New(ish) releases would probably be the more typical use of the DVD service but we only see a fraction of those and I’ve found myself actually going to the cinema a little more these days anyway. The local ones are actually quite comfortable and one of them is over-21 only with decent drinks and food.
I still have the “two-at-a-time” service, but don’t use it that much anymore. Frankly, the website is very unfriendly if you are just trying to browse. If I know what I want to get, it’s serviceable. But I long for the days when it was fairly easy to browse through the genres and to see what was new. (The same applies to Netflix and Prime, but they were always pretty bad so I don’t miss it that much.)
What I REALLY want is a VHS service. There are still lots of movies, TV series, and other items of interest that were never released on DVD or made available for streaming. (Yes, I still have several serviceable VCRs.)
I get two at a time, 1-2 mailings per week. I hope it never goes away.
mmm