[HN Gopher] Netflix will end its DVD service after 25 years
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Netflix will end its DVD service after 25 years
Author : jbegley
Score : 177 points
Date : 2023-04-18 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| cogogo wrote:
| IIRC when I subscribed to the dvd service 23 years ago or so you
| could actually browse a library. Maybe it's an apple tv thing but
| browsing titles feels near impossible in today's streaming world
| - especially on netflix.
|
| Side note: would love to know my ltcv - almost an annuity at this
| point.
| k__ wrote:
| I remember a friend telling me about it in 2006.
|
| They would order movies and send them back again. Sounded like
| too much trouble to me, because I had a DVD renting machine next
| door.
|
| When streaming became a thing, I didn't remember the name and
| thought Netflix was a brand new thing.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They had a massive catalog and a good recommendation engine
| based on what you've viewed and queued up. No rental store or
| kiosk could match it.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| TIL it's still going.
| captaintobs wrote:
| It's such a funny story that Blockbuster had a chance to buy
| Netflix for $50 million.
| haolez wrote:
| This could also have led to a bad ending. They could have
| killed what would make Netflix great and successful.
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| > They could have killed what would make Netflix great and
| successful
|
| You mean like Netflix is doing now?
| isk517 wrote:
| Yeah, but it's taken them the better part of a decade to do
| that. If they had been bought by Blockbuster they would
| have had access to people with the know-how and experience
| necessary to destroy a successful business quicker and more
| efficiently.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes but without making all those tech folks rich first.
|
| (not hating, get rich if you can)
| dnissley wrote:
| Yes, but without the cambrian explosion of content that
| netflix footed the bill for over so many years
| echelon wrote:
| Netflix did not create a Cambrian explosion of video
| content. That would be YouTube and TikTok.
|
| The Cambrian explosion of cinema is still waiting to
| happen, but generative AI is poised to deliver on that
| sooner or later.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| What I'll really miss about Netflix DVD is the recommendation
| system. It adapted to the user rather than showing some pointless
| average. I graded things from 1-5 with 3 being a movie I liked
| and when it showed me ratings, it would show me what my expected
| rating would be. So when I saw a three star movie, I could expect
| to like it. If I saw a 4 star movie I could expect to really like
| it. I've not seen anything to replicate that since.
| DavidAdams wrote:
| This story prompted me to look into my email archives and I found
| an email thread from 2002 about how I accentually sent one of my
| own DVDs back in the Netflix envelope, and we had to straighten
| that out.
| ignite wrote:
| I don't see a date. Anyone know? I still have this service. Like
| the other commenters, I have it to get access to content I can't
| otherwise get. Netflix streaming is, honestly, not full of very
| interesting titles. The DVD catalog is much more interesting.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > it will ship its final DVDs to customers on Sept. 29
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Pour one out for a real one. I haven't rented a disc from Netflix
| in at least a decade but as someone who joined in 1999 (I got my
| first DVD player for Christmas in 1998) and used to lovingly
| curate my queue, I have such fond memories of the service in high
| school and college.
|
| As a movie lover, Netflix was a great way to get stuff that was
| either out of print or sometimes prohibitively expensive (certain
| Criterion discs, box sets of TV shows) that I couldn't find
| anywhere else. I was/am an avid movie collector, so I often
| bought when I could, but Netflix was such a great way to rent
| stuff I didn't know if I wanted to buy or not and an early way to
| binge-watch TV seasons I even paid for the 4 or 5 discs out at
| one time option at one point. I probably still have some DVDs
| from Netflix that I forgot to return (and then reported as
| "lost") in boxes somewhere.
|
| I still buy a lot of physical media, even though I then almost
| immediately rip it to my Plex server, because I prefer the
| bitrate and extra features -- I buy digital movies/TV shows too
| because iTunes always has sales -- but the era of renting a
| physical disc ended a long time ago for me.
|
| Still, seeing this makes me a bit sad, just because of the
| memories I have of a simpler time and because the selection was
| just so fantastic (still better than what you can get on
| streaming for some stuff).
| scrum-treats wrote:
| [dead]
| rektide wrote:
| Thus we come to the sad end of a tale. A once robust medium where
| people could own content (yes the MPAA and RIAA will disagree
| with that statement, but at least users have some right of first
| sale rights) is dead. A medium where most of the world's good
| content got published is dead.
|
| Now we have ever reshuffling access to a smaller select catalog
| of stuff. Ever piece of content has to be fueded over by lawyers
| & rights holders. DVDs and Blurays exist but primarily for
| mainstream content & republishes of old & smaller content is
| rare.
|
| Netflix has attained their goal of disrupting reliable access to
| the form's moving pictures.
| lancesells wrote:
| This sounds like a business opportunity for someone.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Netflix didn't have this service outside the US, and (at least
| in the last decade, there were some services like LoveFilm a
| long time ago) nobody has launched a competitor - the rising
| cost of postage and shrinking physical production means there's
| no opportunity here.
| overcast wrote:
| Yeh, Redbox.
| pavon wrote:
| Not the same. Redbox is a good Blockbuster replacement in
| that they have a good selection of recent hits, but not much
| else. What made Netflix magical was that it had a huge back
| catalog - larger than any rental store or library I have ever
| used.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's a niche, but I don't know how profitable it is. They pay
| postage both ways, which must cost them a significant fraction
| of a dollar. It doesn't take all that many disks per month to
| eat their profit margin.
|
| And it all seems pretty hard on the disks. I've had a few disks
| arrive broken, including one just recently. I know that
| sometimes they have studio agreements to burn their own custom
| disks, but sometimes they're just paying full retail price.
|
| Netflix got rid of much of its back catalog of cinephile movies
| a long time ago. I suspect that they just stopped replacing
| them when the physical disk broke. I don't know how big the
| market is for people who want obscure movies; I'm sure it's not
| zero, but it's probably not enormous.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Could you have "remote access" to a DVD player in the cloud?
| And then stream the audio and video to a TV? Suppose you had
| one user per "DVD" at a time and you let them "borrow it"
| like they do ebooks at the library. It might be shutdown
| quick based upon the streaming laws but it does seem like a
| sort of variation to it all.
|
| I think old movies will find their way, there is a relatively
| small number of them but there is an awful lot of TV (also
| probably just awful TV) that I have a very hard time finding
| someone wanting to pay to have it streamed. Other than some
| pop culture memories and nostalgia, I don't know that there
| is a great loss; the really high quality content tends to
| live on. It doesn't feel right. When Netflix DVDs are gone,
| there is a lot of stuff that I don't know where you could
| find it.
| wrycoder wrote:
| It's a big deal for me. There's very little on Netflix
| streaming that interests me, but I've got a DVD queue of over
| 400 great films.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's what Netflix's niche should have been. They can own
| one copy of every movie. I gather that they used to have
| the greatest library in the world, and have gradually let
| it diminish to a kind of glorified Redbox.
|
| I discovered that I'm just not a cinephile. I would love to
| love old, great, less-well-known films, but I just use TV
| these days as mindless distraction. It's the cinephiles
| (and fans of other material that doesn't get picked up by
| streaming, like some anime) who really lose out in this.
| verisimilitude wrote:
| "We want to be ready when video-on-demand happens. That's why the
| company is called Netflix, not DVD-by-Mail."
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on...
| nostromo wrote:
| This has to be the biggest pivot I've seen in my life. A truly
| epic reworking of an entire company from successful business
| model A to successful business model B -- both wildly successful.
| And really there was a second pivot too: from streaming platform
| to original content studio.
|
| It's a great reminder to focus on what value you bring to your
| customers (watching videos), not on any particular business model
| or way of doing business.
| pavon wrote:
| The way I heard it, Netflix started with the intent of being a
| streaming company but found it more difficult than expected so
| they pivoted to mailing DVDs, but continued to work on the
| streaming in the background until the market forces made it
| viable to pivot back (licensing, residential internet speeds,
| etc).
| paxys wrote:
| They may have had an idea for it in their heads, sure, but in
| the mid 90s (when they started their business) online video
| streaming was very, very far from reality. This was before
| the first online stream, before RealPlayer, before
| Broadcast.com. None of the mainstream video compression
| standards existed. You couldn't even stream video over
| ethernet back then. It was only the internet infrastructure
| upgrades over the next decade which made it feasible for
| general consumers.
| donatj wrote:
| NO! I still use and love DVD Netflix.
|
| It's the only way to see a ton of things short of piracy.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > short of piracy.
|
| I try to be sympathetic to the entertainment industry when it
| comes to the topic of piracy, but they're really working
| overtime to make it harder and harder to be...
| glonq wrote:
| I credit Valve's Steam for retiring me from software piracy,
| Spotify for retiring me from music piracy, and Netflix for
| retiring me from movie piracy.
|
| And "the terrible quality of primetime network TV programs" for
| retiring me from TV piracy ;)
| paxys wrote:
| And yet all of these same companies are responsible for today's
| reality where you own nothing and can resell nothing.
| Converting the mainstream commerce system from simple buying
| and selling of goods into licenses and subscriptions is the
| biggest scam corporations have ever pulled on the consumer
| class.
| rektide wrote:
| I have hundreds of Steam games & keep buying there but god damn
| does it make me sad to have traded first-sale rights for this
| flimsy access to a catalog with no ability to share or resell.
|
| I resisted for so long. But now my library is so big. I feel
| like half the random games I get are only available on steam or
| other like services anyways.
| standardUser wrote:
| I no longer own any DVD or Blu-ray drives, or any optical drives
| at all! And even if I did, I wouldn't want to sit through the
| title screens or deal with the menus. Too many years of instant
| playing from streaming services and pirated downloads has spoiled
| me. And I don't miss the old ways even a little.
| 35208654 wrote:
| I doubt they have the storage for all those discs. Won't they
| just let everyone keep them?
| fullshark wrote:
| Honestly that seems like a great marketing/PR idea, give all
| longtime subscribers (i.e. at least last 3 months) the chance
| to pick up a free dvd.
| giantrobot wrote:
| At last, I can get a free Gigli DVD! Oh wondrous day!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I wonder what they're going to do with the library of discs.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I hope they donate them to some libraries or something and not
| just dump them in a landfill
| Arrath wrote:
| I have to imagine there was a trend away from refreshing the
| inventory as discs wore out while management was mulling the
| decision to shutter this side of the business, a lot of the
| inventory might be fairly marginal and worn by this point.
|
| E: Not to say that Netflix should just dumpster it all. I'd
| love to see a pennies-on-the-dollar buyer beware 'these might
| be scratched to hell' wholesale for anyone who cares to pick
| some up. Whether its a la carte, or "Buy 10 <genre> for $X"
| or, well, who knows. Just about anything would be better than
| tossing 'em all into a landfill.
| evanelias wrote:
| Whatever route they choose, hopefully they have better luck
| than the infamous Kim's Video collection:
| https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/09/12/the-strange-fate-
| of-...
| justinator wrote:
| One word: The Criterion Collection
|
| OK, that's three words.
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| Where am I supposed to get movies from now? Serious question,
| given that Blockbuster etc. no longer exist, and I don't want to
| use streaming services with terrible compression artifacts and
| dubious 24Hz->60Hz conversion.
| temp-amp wrote:
| Rent from your local library. Most movies are free, newer ones
| $1 or $1.50 for week. You can request movies from any of your
| county's library branches and it'll be shipped to your local
| branch.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Where do you live? My California county library system has
| something like a 20 item limit on checkout and has large set of
| USA and foreign DVDs and video games in addition to the
| expected books.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| You can still buy them. And then later re-sell them, if you so
| choose.
| rr808 wrote:
| Get 4k streaming? Depends on the app, but on my LG OLED and
| Netflix 4k and Amazon Prime shows are incredible with the right
| content.
| wyager wrote:
| Netflix 4k compression is pretty bad. Lots of aggressive
| banding, blocking, and other compression artifacts. If you
| don't notice them, good - don't try to start looking for
| them.
| rr808 wrote:
| Including Netflix content or just 3rd party? I always
| thought Netflix content looked better.
| sushisource wrote:
| I consistently have issues with Prime failing to stream at 4k
| quality. Netflix works great typically.
| reaperman wrote:
| I can often see compression though and there's no way to tell
| the player to "just pause for awhile and buffer instead of
| downgrading the bitrate".
|
| This is on a 5Gbps/5Gbps fiber connection.
| rr808 wrote:
| A whole DVD only stores 4.7 gb, so a 5 gbps network is well
| fast enough. Maybe depends on your hardware. Netflix you
| need the top plan to get 4k streaming though.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| A 4K blu-ray film is usually over 80 GB in disc quality.
| sgt wrote:
| It's not whether Gbps is fast enough, it's that the
| egress traffic for the streaming provider costs a lot of
| money, and they do everything they can to serve 1080p or
| 4k content that is actually much lower in quality than
| what we expect.
|
| A lot of scenes look very impressive until you start
| seeing artifacts and hearing poor sound.
| ta1243 wrote:
| So how can you deal with Bluerays, let alone DVDs
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| You can get a bluray drive for under $100 and libraries do
| bluray disks now.
| reaperman wrote:
| Honestly? Pirate them? Passthepopcorn and Piratebay are still
| going strong. Easy enough to get "remuxes" which are
| uncompressed. Though usually on the private trackers, some
| light compression is truly not noticeable -- the people doing
| the compression on private trackers really, really care about
| visual quality.
| medler wrote:
| Isn't passthepopcorn pretty much impossible to get into?
| smcl wrote:
| Your friendly neighbourhood torrent merchant, I guess
| wmf wrote:
| Kaleidescape (just don't ask the price)
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Don't you still have to buy each movie individually? That's
| how it used to work at least.
| pikminguy wrote:
| You can still buy DVDs, or rent them from Redbox, or if you're
| lucky enough to have a local library with a DVD collection you
| can borrow them.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I meant "preferably without having to collect a huge
| collection of physical stuff in my house". Vinyl records
| already take up all the space I want to allocate to media
| collections ...
|
| Redbox and the library are great suggestions, thank you!
| mcshicks wrote:
| I borrow a lot from my local library but often they are
| unplayable somewhere in the middle. It can happen with
| Netflix also but it seems much less frequent.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm not expecting RedBox to last much longer, personally.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| It's a shame too for those that live in more rural areas
| where broadband services / streaming really aren't a
| solution.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > dubious 24Hz->60Hz conversion
|
| Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my
| TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes
| into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought
| all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they're
| showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The one big advantage the disk service had over streaming, was
| that Netflix could buy the disks from anywhere (even the local
| Walmart, if they had to), and lend them to customers.
|
| Streaming requires negotiating licensing rights, with each IP
| owner independently.
|
| This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the
| streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| This is most certainly not the case. Rental licenses are their
| own thing and usually get their own media stock. For DVDs, the
| discs usually had basic monochrome screen printing and came in
| paper sleeves that would later be processed into rent-able
| form.
| Retric wrote:
| Where's the contract you sign when buying a DVD?
|
| If you want to get a copy before it's for general sale then
| you need to sign a contract, if you buy it at Walmart you
| don't.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| There is one, in the sense that the law states you cannot
| use the _digital_ contents any way you like - you can only
| use the digital contents for your own personal, home use.
|
| _However,_ the physical disk is protected by First Sale
| Doctrine. You can sell it, rent it, auction it, destroy it,
| whatever you want. The same applies to, say, your laptop.
| You can do whatever you physically want to your laptop,
| even if you can 't copy your Windows license wherever you
| like.
| Retric wrote:
| Which is why you can lend people the physical disk for
| someone to use at home, but can't stream people the DVD.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Right of first sale lets the buyer rent out discs. No matter
| what publisher/studio cartels might tell you, no licensing
| from the publisher is required. This doesn't preclude the
| existence of specially packaged "rental" discs but Netflix is
| not and has never been limited to those.
| pavon wrote:
| Nope, you only need a rental license to get copies of movies
| to rent out _before_ they are available to purchase (and the
| contract for those often made you agree to only use rental
| licenses for any movies from that publisher). If your rental
| business is content with always waiting for DVDs to be
| released to the public then yes you can rent out any legally
| purchased DVDs by the right of first sale.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Correct -- and studios decided to go direct-to-consumer in
| the late 1990s, realizing they could sell way more discs
| for $14.99 (often sold for $9.99) to the general public
| than they could sell $50 discs to rental shops. Plus, the
| technology allowed studios to digitize their back catalogs
| that had never had home video releases, opening up a new
| revenue stream that would last another decade until over-
| saturation and the recession stopped growth (the HD-DVD vs
| Blu-ray battle didn't help) and consumers transitioned very
| quickly from VOD/digital purchases to streaming.
|
| When direct-to-consumer happened, there was typically not
| any difference between when a large rental chain got a disc
| and when I could pick mine up on Tuesday morning at Best
| Buy (or get it in the mail, sometimes arriving the day
| before) or wherever.
|
| Some chains like Blockbuster did sign rental agreements
| with studios both because of the bulk orders they needed
| and because for a few years, Blockbuster had to stock VHS
| tapes AND DVDs and the studios would basically make them
| sign those agreements if they still wanted to get VHS tapes
| -- but nothing stopped them from carrying the home release
| versions from retail if a rental copy was not available.
| And as you say, nothing stopped the indie shops from buying
| Tuesday morning at 10am and then immediately putting them
| out to rent.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's not true - most normal DVDs/BluRays come
| with a "not for rental" text somewhere and you can't legally
| rent them. Distributors sell different copies of discs which
| specifically are for the rental market and which come with a
| different licence.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Redbox probably had a specific agreement with the DVD creator
| to buy in bulk at a discount. You are free as a business to
| have special terms that restrict your rights when you buy
| from a vendor
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I'm almost positive that Netflix had a licensing agreement to
| print as many discs as they needed after a while. After the
| first few years, the number of "branded" discs with the
| silkscreened movie logos dropped dramatically.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Sure, but that's because the threat of "just buying
| originals" existed. Publishers had to choose from "be paid
| some money, and Netflix gets a deal on copies of movies,"
| or "be paid zero money, and Netflix pays extra to scrounge
| up copies of those movies from somebody else." Netflix (and
| movie viewers) get what they want either way, so the
| publisher can't just hold firm on a high price or block
| distribution of the film.
| [deleted]
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Yes, that change happened early on. They could print DVDs
| on demand at negligible cost to Netflix and in return the
| studios received a fixed fee per rental instead of a fixed
| fee per DVD.
|
| A major problem was the high breakage rate for the DVDs
| they were renting. This created issues with the supply
| chain of new DVDs to replace broken ones since DVDs are not
| considered continuously consumed, disposable products.
| Additionally, it made it easier to manage the bursty nature
| of demand for particular DVDs since you no longer had to
| optimize the economics around the number of rentals per
| physical DVD.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Well, the studios never really had a problem with Netflix
| as a DVD rental company and were usually happy to supply
| them discs. Netflix's pricing model didn't cut into the
| immense profit studios were starting to see from the home
| entertainment boom (which was tied to DVD as a medium) and
| if anything, they had a massive bulk buyer. Plus, for the
| first five or six years, Netflix was way smaller than the
| Blockbuster. Studios knew that if The Matrix or Lord of the
| Rings or Star Wars Episode 1 or whatever was released and
| people wanted to watch it immediately, they would buy it
| rather than waiting for it to be available from Netflix (or
| Blockbuster or Hollywood Video). Meanwhile, they could use
| Netflix as a longtail way to sell bulk discs of titles that
| might not do tremendous retail numbers. Plus, as fast as
| Netflix was, there was still a delay of a few days between
| requesting a movie and getting it or returning one and
| getting another. For a new release, you'd be just as likely
| to try to buy it if you absolutely had to see it that
| weekend.
|
| It was Redbox that got the studios on the ropes. Not only
| were home entertainment revenues dropping because of over-
| saturation, a bad economy, and burgeoning digital rental
| options -- and these were revenues the studios had started
| to rely on and build into their budget forecasting for
| films that would often only become profitable after a
| successful home release -- being able to get a new release
| for $1 from a kiosk (a kiosk that can store 500 copies and
| might be loaded up with just the top X new releases) and
| then returned and re-rented within 24 hours, that was a
| problem. Because now I don't have to pay $15 for that movie
| I'm not sure I'll ever watch again and that will clutter up
| the living room, I can just drive up to the grocery store
| or the gas station or whatever and grab a disc and go. And
| a website will tell me where the disc is available if it's
| out at the place up the street. And it's $1 and I can just
| return it right after I watch it. $1 rentals was a threat,
| but Netflix never had that pricing. They were like $7.99
| for one out at a time and then it would go up from there.
|
| But the studios didn't have a problem with Netflix and in
| the early years, were probably able to get better terms
| (for the studio) with them on bulk purchases than they had
| with Blockbuster.
|
| Studios didn't start to have to grapple with Netflix until
| Netflix signed its landmark deal with Starz, allowing it to
| stream Starz's catalog of content (there was no provision
| in the Starz contract with studios that disallowed offering
| a digital streaming option -- future contracts obviously
| added those clauses but that would take several years to
| expire), thus truly making good on Reed Hasting's vision of
| having the internet deliver movies.
|
| And even then, the relationship was adversarial but also
| somewhat necessary from both sides, because Netflix needed
| to license content for its library, and studios needed that
| sweet licensing revenue (at least before Netflix started to
| create its own content that competed directly against the
| studios).
| mejutoco wrote:
| But reselling is always allowed. I wonder where the legal
| line is between renting and selling back and forth.
| gambiting wrote:
| The way the law works is that intent matters more than the
| actual written word. Even if the law explicitly says
| "renting needs a licence but resale is fine" you wouldn't
| get away with a "loophole" of saying "ok you're really
| buying a disc from us for $10 and then we buy it back from
| you after a week for $5" because it's clear that you're
| just doing renting with extra steps. It wouldn't survive
| any judicial scrutiny.
| [deleted]
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed. This is why there's a fight to pack judges of a
| certain ideological bent into judiciaries.
|
| To use a Non-US example of the judiciary looking the
| other way because the letter of the law is satisfied, but
| not the intent:
|
| https://www.mei.edu/publications/temporary-marriage-iran-
| and...
| arcbyte wrote:
| Intent is the legal line for netflix.
| phamilton wrote:
| VidAngel tried this. They sold movies for $20, bought them
| back for $19 when you were done, and then streamed the
| video to you in the meantime. $1 streaming video rentals,
| for movies that weren't available anywhere online.
|
| It did not last long.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Their main problem, IIRC, was that they broke DMCA 1201
| to crack the encryption on the disc, edit the contents of
| the movie, and then stream the movie back to the
| customer; unless the customer requested the disc back.
|
| It wasn't the buying and reselling. It was the editing
| and digital lock picking.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That's not reselling. It's an unauthorized copy that
| required a circumvention device to create.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| VidAngel was the best. Too bad they are gone. The library
| rental system has a bunch of stuff though...
| [deleted]
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| That's not true in the US. This was true in the VHS days,
| where home video and rental releases were separate, but in
| DVD and Blu-rays, there has never been a distinction. First
| sale doctrine means you can't limit what someone else does
| with the product. They can rent it out or resell it. However,
| studios would only release a limited amount of product on
| "home video," priced at $19.95 or whatever, versus the $89.95
| or higher list price for films that were only available
| through distributors as "rental" copies. I remember as a kid
| sometimes getting the local video store to order me a copy of
| a tape that I would then pay full price for because it wasn't
| available otherwise (more often than not, this was what two
| VCRs were for, but I digress).
|
| That changed with DVD, where the studios stopped
| differentiating and went direct-to-consumer.
|
| The proliferation of DVDs without the need for a distinction
| between home video and rental is part of what led to the
| decline of video stores (in addition to the real threat,
| which of course was streaming) because consumers could buy
| their own movie collections instead of renting them for $5
| for 2 nights or whatever Blockbuster used to charge. I became
| an avid DVD collector as a teenager in the peak DVD era
| (1999-2003) and a combination of unsustainable online stores
| (many that were dead by 2001) selling DVDs at rock-bottom
| prices (even during release week) and Blockbuster's
| lackluster selection led to me getting a Netflix account in
| 1999 (thanks, mom, for the credit card!) and then building my
| own collection of what would become thousands of titles,
| rather than rely on the chains. I still have a great affinity
| for local video stores and support my OG hometown video store
| (Videodrome in Atlanta) and Scarecrow Video in Seattle, b/c
| curation is key.
|
| Now, when the DVD boom flatlined in the late 2000s, three of
| the major studios refused to sell directly to Redbox until 28
| days after a tentpole got a home video release because they
| worried about kiosk rentals cutting into their home video
| revenues (which at this point, had often started to overtake
| or match theatrical revenue), but Redbox got around that by
| just buying through other distributors or buying out Walmart,
| Best Buy and Costco stock. They also sued the studios that
| were refusing to sell to them directly. The reason the
| studios went against Redbox was because Redbox undercut them
| by offering rentals for $1 a day and most people (obviously
| not me), stopped collecting movies.
|
| But again, the first sale doctrine means that they can't
| require anyone to buy a different version. This is the same
| with book publishers. They try to strongarm libraries into
| buying library copies of physical books but the truth is, if
| a library needs a book or needs more copies, they can buy
| them from Amazon or a bulk distributor all the same.
| reaperman wrote:
| That feels like a situation that would only affect the "first
| sale" at most. Unless you sign a contract to that effect, I
| don't think it holds. Book publishers tried this with "Only
| for sale outside the USA" but Supreme Court shot that down.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I think it depends on the country. My Japanese discs have
| rentaruJin Zhi (rental forbidden). My North American discs
| do not. European discs seem to have "Not for rental".
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Not true, they are legally rentable for profit without a
| contract. Redbox has stated on the record that they have done
| it sometimes when there were tense moments with movie
| studios. Blockbuster used similar provisions. It's called the
| First Sale Doctrine which applies to all physical products,
| but not necessarily digital products.
|
| It is, however, not legal to rent CDs in the US. Because the
| US is weird.
| [deleted]
| hiatus wrote:
| Sounds like "do not copy" text on keys that are not meant to
| be duplicated.
| SL61 wrote:
| > This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the
| streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
|
| It still does. Just think of a movie or show and search for it,
| and they'll probably have it, although they seem to be missing
| the occasional season.
|
| I think the DVD site would still be popular if more people were
| aware of the size of its catalog. Most probably assume it has
| the same catalog as the streaming service.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I think it would be popular if they even attempted to grow
| that arm of the business. Netflix made it obvious they had
| zero interest in it when they tried to spin it off into
| Qwikster.
| mrWiz wrote:
| I certainly assumed that its catalog was very similar, if not
| identical.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Not even close. There's so much more on the DVD service
| than the streaming side.
|
| To me, the quality of the content was better in the DVD
| service.
|
| I watch a couple of DVDs from Netflix each week. I haven't
| streamed anything from Netflix since 2020.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Redbox had a similar setup, but some companies like Disney
| would not sell them disks in bulk. So instead they bulk
| purchased Disney movies, which also included a digital code to
| redeem the movie online. Redbox sold those as well. Disney sued
| and they went back and forth until Redbox stopped selling codes
| [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20967268/redbox-
| disney-m...
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| I remember DVDs coming with a message before the main feature
| asking you to call Fox if you had rented the DVD instead of
| purchased it so they could crack down on unauthorized
| distribution.
| pavon wrote:
| It is very sad. I still use the DVD service more than the
| streaming service simply because most of the content I want to
| watch isn't available streaming. The back catalog on Netflix
| gets smaller every year as publishers move content off to their
| own services, or to deliberately withhold it.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| it was more fun, too. Something about the queue system and the
| fact it was paused until I returned the DVDs I had prompted me
| to watch more things I hadn't already seen. I tend to default
| to comfort watching with streaming or endless "I'll watch that
| later" cycles. There was something of the 'discovery' process
| of the video rental stores still in netflix.
|
| The site also still had a social component back then with star
| ratings, lists, you could see what your friends were watching
| and comment. There was almost a goodreads vibe to parts of the
| site - it was fun.
| goatherders wrote:
| Agreed. Back with netflix and redbox I would rent movies and
| watch them to the end because it is what i had. Now, I see
| the first 15 minutes of 100 movies a year and might complete
| 10.
| mmmm2 wrote:
| It's kind of the paradox of choice. You knew you had one
| thing to watch and that was it. If something was interesting,
| you stick it in the queue and get to it when you've watched
| the other stuff you already head. And it was exciting to wait
| for something in the mail. There was anticipation.
|
| This is why I think it was smart they started releasing
| content weekly instead of all at once. Give people a chance
| to build excitement and talk about something.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Frankly I think that for innovation it is mandatory to break
| the vertical integration media conglomerates or create some
| form of mandatory licensing for content.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Indeed. Another title for this announcement would be "Netflix
| removes well over 90% of its catalog."
| echelon wrote:
| https://archive.is/gtjDX
| cocacola1 wrote:
| I only ever got one thing from the DVD service: a disc from a
| season of Freakazoid! (that I never returned. Sorry).
|
| I still purchase a lot of Blu-Rays, but I guess others lose a
| source of ripping now. That's unfortunate.
| legitster wrote:
| Remember when Netflix wanted to spin off their DVD service into a
| standalone company? Before the internet bullied them into
| cancelling their plans?
|
| Well, it turns out they were right. A standalone DVD by mail
| service with it's own name might have actually been able to hold
| on. It was a good service that died in the shade of Netflix's
| brand.
|
| As it is, I miss being able to just watch whatever I want and not
| being locked into Netflix's dire content library. Want to make it
| through the Best Pictures nominees? Good luck without having 6
| different streaming services.
| jfengel wrote:
| Huh. And I was just thinking about quitting it. My queue has
| dropped from >80 discs to under a dozen.
|
| I've been relying on it to bring me stuff on services I don't
| subscribe to. That's how I'm watching Picard, for example.
| There's not much else on Paramount I want to see. I could
| subscribe and then ditch it, but it has been convenient to just
| have DVDs arrive in the mail.
|
| But there's less and less of that, and enough stuff on their
| subscription service that I've got plenty of entertainment. (I
| try to limit my staring-at-the-flickering-box time to a half-hour
| or so per day.)
| sliken wrote:
| Sad. Bluray sounds and looks better than any video streaming I've
| seen. Never look for compression artifacts, you'll never be able
| to enjoy highly compressed streaming again.
|
| I got a LG C1 tv, upgraded netflix to 4k streaming ... and was
| disappointed, until I started watching bluray.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Once again piracy provides the best service, and free of charge
| too. Gabe Newell was right.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Can confirm, artifacts are what ruin the picture, once you're
| at 1080p resolution or higher. I've got a _really_ big screen
| (100+ ") and my two seating rows are at only about 5' and 8'
| distance (measured to roughly where the viewer's head is), and
| even under those conditions, a high-quality 1080p source looks
| a ton better on it than a middling-quality 4K source (let alone
| low-quality 4k), all due to compression artifacts. You'd have
| to drop the alternative to high-quality 720p resolution before
| I'd take a middling-quality 4k over it, in how-distracting-is-
| the-picture-quality terms.
| sliken wrote:
| It's pretty bad, especially with the trend for darker movies
| and every light has a blocky grey halo. Definitely hurts the
| immersion.
| criddell wrote:
| A lot of people don't care. More than once I changed the
| setting on my parent's television to stop stretching SD
| channels to fill the wide screen. They didn't care. Nor did
| they care that every SD channel had an HD channel and all they
| had to do was add 100 to the channel number (or something like
| that).
|
| Compression artifacts bug me as well but if I'm watching
| something great, I forget about them pretty quickly. Same goes
| for black and white movies or foreign movies with subtitles. If
| it's good, that all disappears.
| wyager wrote:
| Yep - Netflix 4K compression is pretty bad. They put a fair
| amount of work into specifying content delivery requirements
| (although they have some weird requirements like asking for P3
| rather than Rec.2020) but then they compress the hell out of
| everything so it looks bad anyway. Very frustrating to see
| aggressive banding, block artifacts, etc. It is in many ways a
| blessing to be completely oblivious to such defects, which most
| people seem to be.
|
| Yet another way in which streaming content providers seem to be
| incentivizing piracy. You can certainly pirate a full-quality
| blu-ray copy of a movie.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Apple TV+ has the best quality/bitrate for 4k, I wish Netflix
| would up their bitrate a bit as quality seems pretty
| mediocre.
|
| The bigger problem with Netflix 4k though is that the "look"
| of every show is extremely uniform -- to the point that its
| almost like the same people made every show! This is
| suspected to be due to the small set of "approved" equipment
| Netflix requires the producers/cast/crew to use and
| standardized post-processing. They should allow more freedom
| in that respect -- many non-Netflix shows these days have a
| lot more personality simply because they don't have that
| muted/desaturated Netflix look.
| sgt wrote:
| Can confirm. Apple TV+ makes me want to not use Netflix.
| But of course with everything being spread around, you need
| all these different types of streaming services. Torrent is
| sometimes an option.
| js2 wrote:
| There's a single premium "streaming" service that I know of,
| but it is not cheap:
|
| https://www.kaleidescape.com/
|
| It's not technically streaming because any movie that you rent
| first has to be fully downloaded to local storage on one of
| their devices. And you're talking $6K for an entry-level
| device, just for the privilege of being able to rent/buy movies
| from their store:
|
| https://www.soundandvision.com/content/kaleidescape-compact-...
|
| However, rentals/purchases are equivalent quality (if not bit-
| for-bit identical) to Blu-ray media.
|
| The company was started by one of the founders of NetApp back
| in 2001, so it was way ahead of its time. I guess it's survived
| by sticking to the niche high-end audio-visual market.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidescape
| blue_cookeh wrote:
| presumably this is ideal for environments like boats or
| private jets with limited connectivity - the sort of owners
| of which can afford more insane pricing
| derwiki wrote:
| Your local library might be a good option! Mine has an
| extensive selection of Bluray and can request from other nearby
| libraries.
| jmbwell wrote:
| To this day, I miss:
|
| - the Queue
|
| - Reviews and suggestions from my actual IRL human non-
| algorithmic friends
|
| Netflix knows what's best for Netflix I guess, but those two
| features are what made the service for me. I discovered so much
| great stuff with those two simple functions.
| subpixel wrote:
| Ah, I recall 1998 when my big idea was a DVD delivery and pickup
| service for Manhattan, with an online selection tool, utilizing
| the bicycle messengers that were already delivering items to your
| office.
|
| Thankfully nobody encouraged me and I never wasted blood and
| treasure on the project ;)
| [deleted]
| retrocryptid wrote:
| They should keep a small DVD by mail service and run it out of
| the last remaining Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. That way tourists
| could come and see DVDs on the shelf and a bunch of people and
| machines stuffing DVDs in envelopes to see how we all lived in
| the 90s and early 2000s.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Remember back when Netflix wanted to split its DVD shipping
| business and its streaming business into two companies.
|
| The DVD shipping business would've been called Qwikster.
|
| Guess it would've died today had it happened.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netflix-idUSTRE78I23B2011...
| qqqwerty wrote:
| The NFLX share price dropped something like 70-80% after that
| announcement. At the time, I was a very happy subscriber and it
| occurred to me that, despite being on a DVD plan, I had only
| been watching via streaming for quite a while. Got a sense that
| the market might be overreacting and bought some shares. That
| turned out to be a great decision, my only regret was not
| buying more.
|
| I highly doubt that we are going to see that again this time
| around.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I have fond memories of the Netflix DVD service. In high school,
| I would get a disk, immediately burn a copy, and return it the
| same day. I could get about 20-25 DVDs a month on the 3-DVD plan
| this way.
|
| Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were
| single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the
| smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared
| desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I
| think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive.
|
| At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started
| delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this
| many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and
| I was rewarded a free month.
|
| After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard
| drives started getting large enough that I could just store all
| the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer
| DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally
| towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie
| sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances
| of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final
| transition.
|
| I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really
| excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time
| labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production
| font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they
| came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays,
| with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many
| movies barely elicits a shrug.
|
| But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a
| formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in
| the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world.
| Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I
| watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.
| rmorey wrote:
| When blockbuster was going out of business they offered a free
| trial of their similar service for video games. I had soft
| modded my wii to rip play games from a hard drive, so I got
| about 20 or so games ripped to my hard drive this way. Good
| times. Till my roommate in college formatted my hard drive and
| I lost all my games (not just the blockbuster ones). This guy
| spat on me, and I forgave him for that, but never for this. God
| damn it Paul :(
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't rip a bunch of Netflix stuff because I'm a
| movie collector, but I used to abuse Blockbuster's video game
| service and rip Xbox and Wii games from on the reg. I still
| have my modded Xbox from 2002 with a bunch of old games on it
| (my hacked Wii still works too).
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I did something similar -- though I didn't burn as many discs
| (my friends did, however) because I've always been a collector.
| But like you, Netflix exposed me to so many movies and TV shows
| I would have otherwise not been able to see (or afford, and I
| used to spend a couple hundred a month on physical media!)
|
| The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had
| to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is
| just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the
| recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| could you explain a little more about the lawsuit ? I don't
| understand why they'd have to stop using their recommendation
| system.
| awad wrote:
| Believe it's referring to this:
| https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/
| mhb wrote:
| Interesting. But why couldn't they continue using the
| existing recommendation system which was excellent.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a
| while.
|
| I have to think that the real problem is that the things
| Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things
| rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new
| metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge
| watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first
| weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the
| _best_ recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever
| they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as
| possible. Those two things aren 't necessarily at odds,
| but they aren't the same thing either.
|
| Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for
| getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content
| they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was
| offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so
| having good recommendations was the sort of thing that
| would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber
| churn.
| CamelRocketFish wrote:
| If you open Google and type in "netflix recommendation
| system lawsuit" you'll find many results on the first page
| explaining it. You can use this method for a lot of topics
| that people here on hacker news mentions.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Your low effort comment is a hundred times worse than the
| one you responded to. Trying to shame someone in that
| sarcastic juvenile tone for asking a question in good
| faith is itself shameful.
|
| People naturally respond to such things and use them to
| segue into another topic as part of conversation, and
| sometimes it is nice to have someone tell their
| recollection of a story instead of getting the wikipedia
| version.
|
| I encourage you to stop doing this.
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| yeah, I know. But as another commenter said[0], the
| lawsuit still does not explain why netflix changed its
| recommendation system.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35620957
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| They had a $1 million prize for improving the
| recommendation algorithm. The data was anonymized and
| sanitized but it was apparently potentially possible to
| identify people from some of the data. A closeted-lesbian
| mother filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix (even
| though I do not think she was actually outed by the
| dataset, meaning I do not think anyone ever connected her
| rental history to her) on the basis that offering the
| dataset to researchers at all was a violation of US privacy
| laws over video rental records. The argument was that
| someone looking at her video rental records could deduce
| that she was actually gay.
|
| It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be
| about privacy in general, but video rental records are
| protected differently from some other data because of the
| failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part
| because reporters were able to get his video rental records
| whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember
| all the details). As a result of the Bork situation,
| federal law was passed to protect video rental records.
| Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something
| similar with its Beacon program.
|
| Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of
| the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they
| wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the
| FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or
| potentially "outing" anyone.
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/
| fortran77 wrote:
| > ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk,
| which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last
| 15-minutes or so.
|
| DVDs are read/written from the center out.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I did the exact same thing in high school. I would rush home
| from school, and on a good day I could get all 3 DVDs ripped
| and back to the post office before 5pm for same-day turnaround.
| I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed
| based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase
| right you could get two entire turnarounds per week.
|
| For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive
| space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after
| the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a
| month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful.
|
| I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did
| the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD
| collections. I don't think any of them lasted long. Heck, some
| of those could have been a single person mailing out and
| restocking discs.
| mentos wrote:
| Ha I had the same experience renting Xbox games from
| Blockbuster. Got to the point where I'd rent a stack of games,
| rip them to my modded Xbox in my car then return them to the
| drop bin to perplexed faces of employees inside who had just
| rung me up an hour earlier.
|
| Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just
| amassing a library.
|
| For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've
| atoned for some of these 'crimes'
| tquinn wrote:
| That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their
| car.
|
| It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of
| collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go
| full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play
| anything.
| awad wrote:
| You're touching on something I've always been fascinated
| about...the game being the collection and building of the
| library itself. I suppose it's not that different from any
| other hobby centered around collectibles and yet with media,
| especially digital media, it always felt a bit different. I'm
| not sure why.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Man, life was complicated if you didn't have friends with
| access to the markets in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. I'd just write
| up a list of stuff I fancied and the Hong Kong kids would show
| up at school at the start of term with suitcases laden with
| fresh VCD warez, games, you name it - everything you'd asked
| for, and then some, and usually stuff that hadn't hit the
| cinemas yet.
|
| This was late 90's, so broadband was still very nascent -
| downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming
| mission.
| tmountain wrote:
| I had a similar experience copying DVDs from the Redbox
| (automated rental kiosk). I felt so accomplished getting all
| the right software and amassing a huge collection of pirated
| disks (stacks of DVD organizers in my room).
|
| Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even
| remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either
| gave them away or donated them...
| olyjohn wrote:
| I had a few binders full of movies on CDs that I had...
| obtained. When I ripped the movies onto them, the quality
| seemed acceptable. Damn good actually when you played them
| back on a CRT TV. Now when I try to watch them, I see how
| terrible they look. At that time, we didn't have DVD burners
| (or they were super expensive), so I would have to transcode
| the DVD into that weird DivX codec so it would fit on the
| 700MB CD.
|
| I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies
| back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the
| rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder
| in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where
| I couldn't copy the file back off of it.
| treve wrote:
| > the ink would degrade, usually towards the center of the
| disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the
| last 15-minutes or so.
|
| CDs are usually read from the middle, going outward. Unlike
| records. If I had to guess it was probably the outside that
| started flaking
| willcipriano wrote:
| Had the exact same experience, ripping and dropping the dvds
| back at the post office a few hours later,even getting
| throttled towards the end of the month.
|
| Used to use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink
| froggertoaster wrote:
| Only Hacker News could make piracy sound so eloquent and - dare
| I say - romantic.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There
| was a record store where you could "buy" a used record for
| like $5 and they'd take it back within a week or so and
| refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes.
|
| For music it makes sense to me, I'll listen to records I like
| over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie
| I have very little desire to watch it again.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if
| this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not
| counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention
| is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I'm not sure
| of the current status of that law.)
| ta1243 wrote:
| Johnny Depp did a good job
| mrits wrote:
| A lot of people don't remember Blockbuster reacted pretty fast
| to Netflix. They let you rent a couple movies out at once for
| something like $20/month. The killer part was when they added
| playstation games for a little more.
|
| I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a
| date to blockbuster was the norm.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Yes, going to Blockbuster with friends was a fun start to
| movie night. It was more of an event. But "Blockbuster and
| chill" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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