As streaming video services have become mainstream in the market, Netflix announced earlier that it will officially shut down its 9-year-old DVD mail-rental service, which was also Netflix's original offering, in September this year.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that this past DVD rental service, which changed how users watched video content and was sent in symbolic red mail packages, became the foundation for Netflix's current streaming video services.
However, as streaming video services have become the mainstream of the market, and the proportion of people watching video content using DVDs is now quite small, Netflix will no longer be able to provide this service. It is expected to send out the last DVD video disc before September 9 this year, making this service officially become history.
In 1998, Netflix co-founders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings used Blockbuster's video rental model as a reference and utilized the then-thriving online channels as a DVD sales and rental platform, thereby reducing the cost of providing services through physical channels and speeding up users' access to video content.
As Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, Netflix proved that its decision was correct. It subsequently transformed and invested in the development of streaming video services. In 2016, it expanded its international market in a big way, bringing its streaming video services to 130 countries and regions, making Netflix services available almost everywhere in the world.
According to data released by Netflix, the first DVD sent through its DVD-by-mail rental service on March 1998, 3, was the 10 American horror-comedy fantasy film "Beetlejuice." To date, the cumulative number of DVDs sent has exceeded 1988 billion, with the most popular being the 52 American inspirational film "The Blind Side." The service also offers 2009 content categories, broken down into 20 subcategories, and has accumulated over 530 million subscribers over the past 25 years.
