“In 1998 we delivered our first DVD. This morning we sent out the last one,” the Los Gatos, Calif.-based group said on its website.
“It’s the end of an era, but DVDs allowed us to lay the foundation for what was to come,” Netflix explained.
Legend has it that the very first DVD shipped in early March 1998 was a copy of the film Beetlejuice.
At the time of its IPO in May 2002, Netflix had more than 600,000 subscribers to its service, which provided access to more than 11,500 titles for a monthly subscription ($19.95 at the time).
Subscribers received their DVD by mail and returned it postage free after viewing.
In addition to the possibility of receiving the film directly at home, one of the innovative points of the formula, which broke with the model of physical video stores, was that Netflix did not set a deadline for returning the DVD and did not charge interest on late payments.
At its peak in 2010, Netflix may have had up to 20 million subscribers to the service, but by then a large proportion of customers were already choosing to watch their films via streaming rather than on DVD.
In fact, in 2007, the group launched a streaming platform that would become its flagship and allow it to adapt to the gradual decline of DVDs.
When the planned end of the DVD rental service was announced in April, Netflix said it had shipped more than five billion films on digital media since its launch.
The most lauded film of the quarter-century that the service lasted was John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side (2010), starring American actress Sandra Bullock.