It is the end of an era that many had assumed had ended years ago.
Netflix will ship its final little red envelope later this month as the company shutters its DVD division.
The writing has obviously been on the wall for many years now, as the company led the way years ago into the era of streaming.
But there are apparently still holdouts who love their DVD and BluRay players and also love the excitement of waiting for their next envelope to arrive in the mail.
The company was founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California.
By 1999 Netflix settled on its flat rate fee for mailed envelopes which was seen as a huge disruption to the standard practice of renting by title.
The company overcame many ups and downs, turning down an early offer by Amazon to buy the company out, and later trying to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million only to be famously laughed out of the building.
But the model soon caught fire and the revenues increased and with it the operations needed to support it.
At its peak, the company was the USPS’s fifth-largest shipper, and maintained 58 shipping facilities, and 128 smaller shuttle facilities in the US.
By 2007 the company had shipped its billionth little red envelope, and with this added muscle it began to explore options for streaming content over the internet.
Just two years later Netflix’s streaming service surpassed its DVD mail business.
Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy three years later when the weight of its debt and brick-and-mortar infrastructure overwhelmed the company.
This month the final five DVD mailing centers will turn off the lights for good.
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