Today, Netflix is the biggest streaming service in the world... but when the company started back in 1997, founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, the idea was that it would be sell and rent DVDs through the mail. (Although the idea of selling DVDs was quickly dropped, making it a rental-only service.) In 1998, the first DVD enter to be rented from Netflix was a copy of Beetlejuice – which is quite a coincidence, since Beetlejuice might also be the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I wasn’t a Netflix user from the start, though. I didn’t get my first batch of Netflix DVDs until 2000... and I don’t think it was my idea to start using the service, I think my mom brought it up to me. I was 16 at that time and had been getting her to take me to video stores throughout the area so I could rent movies ever since I was a little kid. When I started using Netflix, I didn’t even see it was a replacement for video stores, it was just another source of movies to add to the list of places I could get movies from. Although I had a steady stream of Netflix DVDs flowing through my house at all times, I still continued going to the local video stores until they died out around 2010.
I may have been two years late to the Netflix party, but I continued using the DVD rental service right up until they decided to bring it to an end last September. On September 29, 2023, the company shipped out their last DVD (a copy of the True Grit remake)... and I was really sad to see the DVD rental service end, because it had come to mean a lot to me over the 23 years I was a customer. I rented DVDs from the company from the age of 16 until 39, which is quite a chunk of life.
When the service was shutting down, they offered to send PDF copies of “Your DVD History”, and I was sure to get one of those PDF reports so I could preserve that history. According to this report, I rented 3744 DVDs (there were a couple Blu-rays in there as well) from Netflix over my 23 years as a subscriber, which comes out to an average of about 163 movies per year. Not too bad. Especially since I have been taking regular trips to Brazil for the last decade, which meant I wasn’t able to rent DVDs during the times when I was out of the country. I’m sure that knocked down my average substantially.
I didn’t remember this, but apparently the first DVD I ever rented from Netflix, on August 18, 2000, was The Erotic Witch Project, a nudity-packed parody of The Blair Witch Project. That makes sense, since I was 16 years old, interested in nudity, and a fan of The Blair Witch Project. That was quickly followed by the three Shaft films that had been made in the ‘70s, since I was catching up on the franchise after seeing the Samuel L. Jackson Shaft movie in the theatre two months earlier. And so began the Netflix rental spree that kept going until it was no longer possible.
Wikipedia tells me that Netflix charged by rental in those early days. I don’t remember that, but I know that when monthly subscriptions became possible, I had my mom subscribe to the “4 DVDs at Once” plan, which is the most DVDs you could get from the company at one time. We lived in mid-Ohio, which was a great spot to be when it came to these rentals, because there was a Netflix shipping center not far away, in Cleveland. They could send a DVD out one day and I’d receive it the next, allowing me to keep the rentals going at a very quick pace. In an ideal week, they’d send a DVD (or two, three, or four) on Monday, I’d receive the rental(s) and watch on Tuesday, get it (or them) into the mail on Wednesday, and Netflix would receive the return and send out the next DVD (or batch of DVDs) on Thursday. I kept my rental queue packed to the 500 disc limit for all 23 years I used the service, so there were always plenty of movies to choose from.
The first couple years, I would only rent Netflix DVDs when I was at home. But then I decided to continue renting while I was out of state visiting relatives as well. I used to spend every July with my paternal grandmother in Indiana, so for the month of July I would change the shipping address to her address and would get my Netflix DVDs delivered there. The shipping center I dealt with there was in Indianapolis, and compared to my set-up in Ohio it took an extra day for movies to get back and forth, but it still worked well. My grandma passed away in 2010, but when my father was diagnosed with leukemia I also started spending more time at his place in Indiana – and when I was there, his address became my Netflix shipping address. When I went back home, it would switch to my Ohio address. My parents passed away in 2017 and I had to move from Ohio to Tennessee in 2018. When I did, my Netflix shipping address became a Tennessee address. Unfortunately, the nearest shipping center was in Atlanta, Georgia, so the shipping times became longer, which was a bummer.
When you rent 3744 DVDs from a place, shipping them in and out of multiple locations, it makes sense that it would be something important to you. But there’s another reason why the Netflix DVD era is so special to me. It’s because from the year 2002 through 2018, I had an awesome dachshund named Zeppelin – and since I was already renting Netflix DVDs from the day he arrived in my home, it didn’t take him long to realize that the sound of me ripping off the front flap of a Netflix envelope meant that I was about to take something out to the mailbox. That sound became a regular part of my dog’s life. Every time he heard that sound of an envelope flap being ripped off, he would hurry over to the door, ready to walk out to the mailbox with me. Since the sound of a Netflix envelope meant something to my dog, that made it something that was special to me as well.
Netflix started streaming in 2007, and since I was already a DVD customer I had access to the streaming service as well. Of course, I took advantage of it. A new way to watch movies! These days they focus heavily on original content, but back at the start they built up the service by acquiring all kinds of movies, and I remember watching some oddball stuff on there. I think Blood Shack was in the mix, some micro-budget indies, and one of the first movies I ever watched on there was the 1974 John Wayne movie McQ. I didn’t anticipate that Netflix would someday ditch DVD and Blu-ray rentals entirely, becoming a streaming only company, but that’s how it went.
Netflix announced that the DVD service would end in September of 2023, and at the end of August – almost 23 years to the day after my first rentals – I rented my last batch of Netflix DVDs: Welcome to Spring Break, The Left Handed Gun, Past Midnight, and a quadruple feature: Scorpion Thunderbolt, Temple of Hell, Cannibal Curse, and A Dog Called Vengeance. That’s how an era came to an end and another tie to my past has been severed. I move forward without grandparents, without parents, without Zeppelin (he passed away in 2018), and without Netflix DVDs and their red envelopes, which made that unmistakable sound when the front flap was ripped off.
I’m still a Netflix subscriber, using the streaming service regularly. But I’m really going to miss those DVDs.
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