The streaming platform Netflix mailed its latest DVD this Friday, ending a service started 25 years ago that helped the company become an entertainment giant.
The founder of the company, Reed Hastingshas often said that he created Netflix after the movie rental store blockbuster will charge you 40 dollars to return “Apollo 13” six weeks late.
It was then that he came up with the idea of creating a subscription-based DVD-by-mail service that would allow the customer to keep the title for as long as they wanted. Once viewed, the DVD was placed in a prepaid envelope and returned.
Netflix’s message after delivering its latest DVD
“In 1998 we shipped our first DVD. This morning we shipped our last one,” the company said on its website Friday.
“For 25 years, we’ve redefined the way people watch movies and TV shows at home, and shared the excitement of opening their mailboxes with our iconic red envelopes”adds the statement.
In April, when the decision to stop DVD rentals was announced, Netflix co-CEO, Ted Sarandossaid those “iconic” emails “changed the way people consume shows and movies at home, and paved the way for the shift to streaming.”
On its site, the company indicated that the email service accumulated 40 million subscribers, mainly in the United States.
The streaming platform currently has 238 million subscribers around the world.
Netflix noted that the first film sent by mail was the comedy “Beetlejuice” and? Since then it has shipped more than 5.2 billion DVDs.
The most rented was the American sports drama “A possible dream”made by Sandra Bullock, a film about a white family who takes in a homeless black boy, released in 2009, when the DVD service was at the peak of its popularity.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
