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Vox, conversely, says the entire DVD.com operation is run out of a single facility in Fremont, CA, but regardless of the actual numbers, it’s impossible to miss the contraction of this wing of Netflix’s business, which now represents significantly less than 1% of the company’s overall revenue-although DVD.com apparently does still turn a profit. Upwards of 50 distribution centers around the country ran the operation, which The Motley Fool reported last year had shrunk to only 17 outlets. There’s no telling how long even the gutted version of DVD.com (Netflix’s DVD spin-off) will continue to operate, but I imagine I’ll be going down with the ship, still nostalgic for its glory days.Īt its peak in either 2010 or 2011, according to conflicting reports, Netflix’s DVD delivery service numbered around 20 million subscribers, and the company was sending out in the neighborhood of 12 million DVDs per week. We traded in a library of 100,000 titles for one that currently has less than 4,000-and we’re never going to get the former back. In the face of easy, instant access via streaming, consumers were simply all too happy to sacrifice comprehensiveness.

But the scope of that film library has shrunk precipitously, reflecting a lack of interest both from the company and the moviegoing public. Rest assured, Netflix still sends DVDs to its subscribers-myself included-by mail.

At its peak, in fact, the number of DVD titles possessed by Netflix would have dwarfed the entire streaming libraries of all the major streamers today … combined.Īnd now, 10 years later, that DVD library has become a lost treasure-undervalued, hacked to pieces, mothballed and generally a hollow shell of its former self. Just a decade ago, the physical media library possessed by Netflix was well beyond 100,000 titles strong, offering a staggering degree of diversity that essentially made it the equivalent of the best-stocked video store in the world.

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It’s a strange feeling, to look back to a time merely 10 years ago and think “that was a golden era, wasn’t it?” It feels like it should take longer than a decade for that kind of clarity to develop, but the more time I spend looking at the streaming service landscape as a Paste staff writer, the more I find myself returning to the same conclusion: Netflix, as a service, could once say it offered a film library that was unmatched by any other archive of films in the world.