(New York) Netflix officially ended its DVD rental service by mail order in the United States on Friday, founded in 1998 by its initial model, since revolutionized by its migration to streaming.
“In 1998 we delivered our first DVD. This morning we sent the last one,” the Los Gatos, California-based group said on its site.
“It’s the end of an era, but DVDs helped lay the foundation for what came next,” Netflix said.
Legend has it that the very first DVD sent out, in early March 1998, was a copy of the movie Beetlejuice.
At the time of its IPO in May 2002, Netflix claimed more than 600,000 subscribers to its service which, for a monthly subscription ($19.95 at the time), provided access to more than 11,500 titles.
Subscribers received their DVD by post, then returned it by post once viewed, free of postage.
In addition to receiving the film directly at home, one of the innovative points of the formula, which broke with the model of physical video rental stores, was that Netflix did not set any deadline for returning the DVD and did not impose no late fees.
At its peak, in 2010, Netflix will have had up to 20 million subscribers to this service, but at the time, a majority of customers were already choosing to watch their film in streaming rather than on DVD.
The group had in fact launched a streaming platform in 2007, which would become its flagship, allowing it to adjust to the gradual decline of DVDs.
In April, when the planned end of the DVD rental service was announced, Netflix said it had sent more than 5 billion films on digital disc since its inception.
The most praised film over the quarter century that the service lasted was The Blind Side (2010), by John Lee Hancock, with American actress Sandra Bullock.
