Most consumers enjoying Netflix content today are unaware that the streaming giant debuted in 1998 DVD rental (Blu-ray format added later) with mail for a monthly fee. This service, innovative for its time, fueled the decline of brick-and-mortar video stores, including the largest in the world with which it competed.

Today, Netflix leads the video streaming market, but the service the company started with it will close soon. In an official announcement, co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed that the record rental service will be closed on September 29 and explained the importance it had for society at the time: “These iconic red covers changed the way people watched shows and movies at home and paved the way for the shift to streaming”.

In the announcement, Netflix offers some interesting information about the service, such as shipping 5.2 billion records by mailthat the first movie to be shipped was Beetlejuice on March 10, 1998, or that at its peak, more than 40 million people subscribed to the new service, which saved customers from having to physically go to a store and wait for it to be available. : you requested something and Netflix sent it to your home.

the end of another era

The closure of Netflix coincides with the loss of use of its format, optical media. After the massive use of floppy disks in the 1980s and 1990s as an external storage standard for computers or as a format for distributing software or video games, the arrival of the CD-ROM represented an impressive leap in the storage industry and limited the use of floppy disks. floppy disks, have practically disappeared today.

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, also used by Netflix, which were shut down in September, they had an impact when Sony managed to push Blu-ray as the standard after a fierce battle with Toshiba. But it was a losing war and the format was barely sustained due to its use on video game consoles.

And that’s it The growth in the use of streaming technologies is unstoppable and it caused major changes in the distribution formats of multimedia content, with a large decline in sales in the area of ​​recording or storage on optical media. In music, on-demand services win by a wide margin, and the same can be said for movies and series. In computers, its use is minimal and almost no new PC contains players/recorders for optical media, betting on internal storage with SSD as the protagonist or external disks (microSD, USB), which are increasingly cheaper, safer and more convenient for moving data between devices.

The world of video games is a strange one, and it’s run somewhat out of fashion for reasons of reselling, collecting, sharing, or because it’s the format that Sony and Microsoft have chosen for their consoles. However, PC digital distribution platforms such as Steam have been a huge success and continue to grow, reflecting the changes that have occurred in other types of content. An on-demand gaming service like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now or subscription services like Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass will end up burying optical media.

in video distribution streaming services are taking over and Netflix DVD and Blu-ray rentals make no sense and have few customers. Its closure was sung.