I received my final Netflix DVD in the mail today. It’s annoying that they decided to end that service–some older and more obscure movies are very difficult to find on any streaming site.
I choose Warcraft for my last one–I intermittently play World of Warcraft, and I’ve been wanting to see the movie for some time. I’m going to keep it–Netflix is not demanding anything back after the 29th.
I stopped my Netflix mail delivery maybe a year ago, but I was one of the minority who really appreciated the service. Their library, at least in the early days, was deep and broad. I discovered a lot of worthwhile movies that way.
mmm
I happen to be lucky in that I live in an area with a good-sized library system that has a wide selection of dvds and blurays to borrow. If I didn’t I don’t know what my source for less popular movies would be. There are no video stores left in my area. I’ve tried streaming services but I wasn’t happy with the selections.
Well, a lot of second hand DVDs of those obscure movies are about to come on the market for purchase.
I was a very new member of the SDMB when I first signed up for Netflix in 2004. I remember planning my queue.
It always fascinates me that we all largely collectively forget that digital movie stores exist. Amazon, Google & Apple (along with smaller players like Vudu) are all happy to sell you almost every semi-popular movie that’s ever existed in their own proprietary DRM locked format, either permanently for $9.99 or for 24 hours for $2.99.
I don’t think anyone has forgotten that. Back in the day, the Netflix DVD service had obscure titles that aren’t in Amazon’s library.
I think I’ll squeeze in one more, if I return my current ones today. But my biggest disappointment is that Netflix sent me an e-mail a couple months ago stating that they “may” send me up to ten at a time in the final months. It seemed like it was meant to be a thank-you gesture. However, I’ve received exactly two at a time ever since. Plus, the shipping has slowed to several days between discs, probably as they shut down shipping centers.
You’d think it might have made sense for them to offer them for sale to rental customers. But probably setting up a system to manage that as a one-off thing is not cost effective.
I subscribed from January 2004 until April 2022. Towards the end, they had few new titles and no information on when many older titles would ever be available. It was great in its heyday.
I’m going to miss them. I just received two yesterday but they had to skip a title due to availability issues. I really wanted to get ‘The Longest Day’ just under the wire but I don’t know if I will.
Last night I went to watch a favorite movie from “My List” on Amazon Prime, only to find out that now that “video is unavailable”. Bastards. F@&$ing streaming. 
All this talk about streaming service and their libraries reminded me of something that surprised me at first. One of the best catalogs of DVDs is actually THE Library, as in your local library branch. Many people and their estates have donated massive DVD collections to libraries and most libraries are networked together. I have to keep reminding myself of this when I go looking for obsure titles
Will Netflix do the same? Or will they destroy them in a cynical ploy to increase streaming revenue?
A few years ago, Netflix rebranded the service as “DVD.com, A Netflix Company”. I think that would have made it relatively easy to spin off or sell it so it could continue. For whatever reason, Netflix chose not to do that.
Netflix offers 3600 movies on streaming (99% of which are from 1980 or later) and had a DVD library of over 100,000 titles. The people who still found value in the DVD service by itself aren’t going to bother pivoting to Netflix streaming but will instead go somewhere else.
Netflix has, no joke, announced that they will be shedding their DVD inventory by mailing their discs to remaining subscribers at random to keep permanently. I’m not sure if donating it was ever considered - the primary issue may be that most libraries already have most of the DVDs they can handle stocked, and that any attempt to deal with the logistics of parcelling out dozens of copies of 100,000 titles would just be a lot of wasted effort for material that’s going to end up at thrift stores or in the trash anyway.
I’m sure there is some way I could connect my TV to a streaming account but it would be difficult (I don’t have my TV connected to any cable system). So I’d end up watching movies on my laptop. I prefer to get discs and watch them on my TV.
Remember that the first-sale doctrine meant that Netflix could offer any DVD that it could buy, but that streaming anything requires negotiating the terms of the deal. So it was far easier to offer lots of stuff the old way. I suspect the problem today is a lot of the new stuff developed for streaming services is never published on DVD at all.
You realize that in 2023 this is like saying “I am sure there is some way I could connect my computer to the internet”?
You can buy a Google Chromecast or any of its 1000 competitors and plug it into a spare HDMI port and you have access to all of your purchased movies from any service on your TV.
The final two I get to “enjoy for as long as I like” are just in time for the holidays and I’ll never have to go without again: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” AND “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
In between, I watched and returned “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.”
Perfect timing. So long, little red envelopes!