Netflix will close its DVD rental store on September 29, and the last shipment to subscribers will have a final surprise as a thank you: 10 free original discs that they won’t have to return. A detail that allows us to go further and they celebrate the end of another era, with the main goal being the decline in the use of optical media.

Today, Netflix is ​​the largest video streaming service in the world, but its beginnings as a company were very different, with an innovative DVD rental service when it launched in 1998. The company sent content from movies and series to customers’ homes in exchange for a monthly subscription. which saves you having to go to a physical store and wait for it to be available.

“These iconic red envelopes changed the way people consumed media at home and paved the way for the shift to streaming”commented Co-CEO Ted Sarandos in the official announcement of the service’s termination. As a celebration and as a ‘final surprise’ Netflix will send customers 10 DVDs for free, which they will not have to return. They won’t know its contents and it will be limited to the United States and while supplies last, but that’s the detail.

Final goodbye DVD?

The termination of Netflix is ​​in accordance with loss of use of its format, DVD and optical media in general. After the massive use of floppy disks in the 1980s and 1990s as a standard for external storage in computers or as a format for distributing software or video games, the arrival of the CD-ROM marked a major leap for the industry and reduced the use of the floppy disk., today it has practically disappeared.

CD-ROM evolved into recordable and rewritable CDs (CD-R/CD-RW) and then DVD. In a time of widespread use, its use is declining in all sectors including Audio CD for music. As for high-definition optical formats, which Netflix also uses in its services, they were influential when Sony managed to establish Blu-ray as the standard after a fierce battle with Toshiba. Sony won the battle but lost the war. The format was hardly maintained due to its use on video game consoles and as a film distribution.

Today, on-demand services are winning by a wide margin in music, and the same can be said for the distribution of movies and series. In computers, its use is minimal and no new PC includes players/recorders for optical media as standard. More of the same in games. Digital distribution platforms for PC like Steam have been a huge success and continue to grow, pointing to the changes that have occurred in other types of content.

Although the world of video games is peculiar and somewhat out of step with the way it operates, for reasons of resale, collecting, sharing, or because it is the format that Sony and Microsoft have chosen for their consoles, on-demand gaming services such as GeForce Now from of NVIDIA or subscription services like Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass will end with DVD, which has been with us for two decades. Netflix will give you the lace at the end of September.