After 25 years of shipping DVDs to customers in its signature red envelopes, Netflix is hitting the “stop” button today on that legacy operation. (It just released a nostalgic short video look back, watch it above if you want to recall the journey from the dial-up modem days.) After opening its doors in 1998 (Beetlejuice was the first title shipped, per a company blog post), the company surpassed 200,000 households in its first year and was on a fast track from there.
Powered by the surge in broadband adoption, the rise of the DVD format and the complacency of brick-and-mortar retailers like Blockbuster, Netflix was soon shipping millions of titles, setting a record in 2011 with 4.9 million in a single day.
By the end, more than 5 billion shipments had been recorded. Once streaming began in 2007, and rivals like Hulu and Prime Video also arrived, physical media were entering eclipse (the iPhone launched that same year) and Netflix began to gradually phase out discs.
Reconciling its physical business with streaming initially daunted company management. An infamous move to split the company into two, creating a new, disc-focused entity called Qwikster, cost the company billions in market value before wiser heads prevailed.
Read more on deadline.com
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