After 25 years of sending out DVDs in their iconic red envelopes, this past week Netflix sent out the last of those envelopes. It’s all about streaming now. No more DVDs arriving in the mail.
Tom and I have been Netflix subscribers for a long time. Not 25 years but a long time. Since 2005. Long before streaming. Like many we always loved to see a red envelope in our mailbox. We actually kept adding discs to our subscription because we were going through those DVDs faster than they could arrive. Netflix also offered outstanding customer service; you could call them and speak to a person if a disc you ordered did not arrive. They sent you out another copy that very day.
Even though those red envelopes were on the flimsy side, we only had a DVD arrive broken one time. That seems like a pretty great record for anything ordered by mail.
Even when we started streaming we also kept our red envelope mail subscription for a number of years because there were films you could not get via streaming. You needed the actual shiny silver DVD in order to watch. This was especially true for foreign or independent films.
These days most people do not even own a DVD player. We tried to give one (we had two) to our children thinking surely one of them would love to have it, but they each were like, “Why?” I think my husband finally hooked up our spare DVD player at our daughter’s house because he could not imagine she would not use it. My theory is that it has a nice layer of dust on it by now or she has gotten rid of it.
What a brilliant idea Netflix was 25 years ago. You did not have to get in your car and go to a video store (yes, videotapes were before DVDs) ; you could just browse on line and order your movie and then it very quickly arrived in the mail. In that bright red envelope.
I read that Netflix didn’t start out using those red envelopes. The first packaging was cardboard mailers; then they gave bright yellow paper mailers a try; and finally, they settled on that well-known bright red paper mailer, cleverly designed so you could open it and then use the same envelope to return it—postage paid, of course. Netflix made it easy. No late fees either. Just return it when you were ready.
The first DVD send out by Netflix was the Tim Burton film Beetlejuice in 1998. I have actually never seen Beetlejuice. Maybe it’s time. Even as the red envelopes were rapidly disappearing from mailboxes, there were still over one million people ordering Netflix DVDs by mail. As a nice gesture, Netflix did not require these last paying customers to return their final DVDs. They were told to just keep them as a souvenir of a different time.
We can still borrow DVDs from many libraries or from friends and many of us have a few cherished DVDs of favorite films that we bought and own. But a DVD arriving in that classic red paper envelope is now a thing of the past, a lovely memory, a story we perhaps will tell our grandchildren and they will shake their heads in wonder about what came by mail for those twenty five years.
Ha at one time we had 3 different queues on Netflix as you could only put 500 titles on a queue and were up to 5 at a time red envelopes. I do miss those envelopes but have to say that I have completely embraced the new world of streaming and all that it has to offer. So many shows. So many movies. I have no idea exactly how streaming works but I love it and I love the amazing variety available to me/us at the click of a remote. (But which remote??LOL)
Good one! We were early subscribers, too. I still have a lot of dvds and 2 players, but rarely watch them. There are way too many streaming services these days and how anyone , besides you and Tom, can keep up is beyond me.