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Movies

Before Delivery-Service Shutdown, Netflix Offers Remaining Customers Up to 10 Free 'Mystery' DVD Rentals (npr.org) 44

Posted by EditorDavid from the red-envelopes dept.
Netflix's 25-year-old delivery service for DVDs (in red envelopes) will go dark on September 29th. But that delivery service's final remaining customers can opt-in "to potentially receive up to 10 extra discs," reports NPR. "Let's have some fun for our finale!" says an email from the company. (Though Business Insider points out that "Customers won't know what movies they'll get; the films will be chosen from what's in their queue.")

NPR notes there's an even bigger mystery: Netflix's promotional email doesn't explicitly tell customers what to do with those discs. This is causing confusion among customers, and debate among the members of online communities like Reddit... A Netflix spokesperson told NPR the company is indeed expecting to get those discs back, and plans to release more specifics about winding down its DVD business in a month or so.

Attorney Lindsay Spiller of the San Francisco entertainment and business law firm Spiller Law said Netflix couldn't give the DVDs away even if it wanted to. "The filmmakers and property rights owners give Netflix a license, and then they can sub-license it to their subscribers," Spiller said. "But they can't give anybody ownership. They don't have it themselves."
At its peak, the service had 40 million subscribers, reports Today. (They add that the first DVD Netflix ever shipped was Beetlejuice — and the most-shipped DVD ever was The Blind Side.)

A quarter of a century later, Netflix "has sent out more than 5 billion DVDs to customers since launching in 1998," NPR notes. "The discs are not easily recyclable. Most of them end up in landfill."
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Before Delivery-Service Shutdown, Netflix Offers Remaining Customers Up to 10 Free 'Mystery' DVD Rentals More

Before Delivery-Service Shutdown, Netflix Offers Remaining Customers Up to 10 Free 'Mystery' DVD Rentals

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  • That should cover the entire "Friday The 13th" movie series, right?

  • Attorney Lindsay Spiller of the San Francisco entertainment and business law firm Spiller Law said Netflix couldn't give the DVDs away even if it wanted to. "The filmmakers and property rights owners give Netflix a license, and then they can sub-license it to their subscribers," Spiller said. "But they can't give anybody ownership. They don't have it themselves."

    Doesn't Netflix own the physical DVDs that they ship out? In which case, first sale doctrine applies.

    • No first sale was ever made though.

      • Does this mean that the movie studios own the discs and had been consigning them to Netflix to rent rather than selling them to Netflix? If so, I'd be interested to read an article explaining this arrangement and how it was arrived at.

      • No first sale was ever made though.

        Netflix didn't buy the DVDs it shipped out?

      • No first sale was ever made though.

        Then who sold me the discs I bought from Netflix when I misplaced them? So far as I was aware, Netflix bought all its own discs, the same as Redbox and others, hence why its library went beyond the confines of the deals they made with friendly studios. Disney famously wasn’t a fan of allowing rentals of its films, but Redbox and Netflix had them anyway.

        • Disney might "not be a fan" of allowing rentals, but they are a fan of making money...

          As for the rental market, well, the answer to that is that "it can get complicated" dating back to the VHS days, and depended upon the studio.

          Mind you, the rental places and the studios would fight to see who could get the most money.

          I'd argue that the DVD/VHS rental market, where a rental place could buy consumer videos and then rent them out, is "unsettled". IE it hasn't been found whether by law a studio can restrict V

          • Public performance rights have nothing to do with this argument. There is no public performance involved with Netflix selling (or failing to collect) DVDs from consumers.

            Or if a rental place can buy consumer DVDs and then rent them out without the studio's permission.

            I think it is firmly established that rental companies can do this. Redbox did this for some time when the studios would not sell them DVDs.
            https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
            Do you really think that the studios would not have invoked any legal remedies they had to stop this?

            • I know that, why do you think I said 'like' as in similar to, rather than 'exactly'?

              As for the legal remedies, like I said, unsettled and risky. Best to avoid.

          • I’m aware of the deals that Blockbuster and other shops worked out with the studios to obtain copies for rental (though my understanding was that those typically came at a higher per-unit price due to their earlier availability and larger quantities, hence why replacements were so costly). Redbox did not work out such deals, which is why they and Disney eventually had a spat over whether Redbox could sell the digital download codes that they had received in the retail copies they purchased. That

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Netflix couldn't give the DVDs away even if it wanted to.

      So it's off to the landfill with them then. Please let us know which one and when.

  • Here is 10 extra DVDs that no one ever rents, you better send them all back though or we will fine you!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      or we will fine you!

      Not fine. Keep charging monthly membership fees.

      I suspect that this is an attempt to get those who have quit the service (like me) to re-enlist for just one more batch. And then maybe hook them on a streaming membership.

      Netflix may have lost a lot more subscribers than they are letting on since the end of DVD announcement.

  • Pass. I don't have a DVD player anymore.

  • It was a good service (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Sunday August 20, 2023 @01:09PM (#63782448)

    I used to be on the one-DVD at a time plan. I was single and pretty good about watching them the night they came and putting them back in the mail the next day.

    What I liked about it wasn't that I didn't have to go out to rent them, though that was nice. I liked that I could manage my queue when I wanted, with reviews and suggestions and the like, and I didn't have to remember or search them out at the store. If the classic film I was looking for wasn't available, I didn't have to figure out plan B.

    • I was on 3 discs which was plenty to never want a TV service for the family. The entire Muppet Show, Mister Rogers, and Voltron series were markedly superior to current programming.

      After streaming got beyond a curiosity the wait time for a disc went from 3-4 days to 3-4 weeks or even 3-months.

      • I can see the appeal of that. I was more interested in knocking out "must watch" films. There was also something about the flat rate that made me feel better about taking a chance on a film rental.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsane ( 148894 )

      Netflix DVDs had (and I'm pretty still have) the deepest and most complete catalogue. Its the real loss.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Used to have.

        Due to damage and/or loss, many DVDs disappeared from their catalog. No longer being distributed by the studios, their catalog withered.

    • It was a great service for many years. We worked our way through many TV series, thanks to Netflix DVDs - and many movies as well. "Netflix and Chill" was a very real thing for us, for quite a while.

      Of course, over the last several years of our subscription Netflix made lots of profit from us. Things got busy, and those discs would sit under the TV, unwatched, for way too long. I didn't actually cancel our single-disc plan until this past January.

  • There is a simple explanation for this: postage is cheaper than disposal costs. They're doing you a "favor" by just mailing out all the DVDs they'll no longer have use for, and if the recipient doesn't want to keep it, that's on them!

    Convenient how that works, eh?

    • From TFS:

      A Netflix spokesperson told NPR the company is indeed expecting to get those discs back..

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it..

        That's not how communication works. Otherwise every conversation would be in legalese.

      • From TFS:

        A Netflix spokesperson told NPR the company is indeed expecting to get those discs back..

        What's the timeline, though? Netflix might say, you must return them before August 2123

  • Polycarbonate is very well recyclable and quite valuable - recycling centers even pay for large amounts of polycarbonate.

  • >"and plans to release more specifics about winding down its DVD business in a month or so."

    Well, it is "disc" business, not "DVD" (have no interest in non-Bluray for many years now).

    I hope that some other company buys it and does at least as good as Netflix Disc did, on a smaller scale. It is a very valuable service for some people. I am one of them. Granted, I will often discontinue service for several months when I have seen everything I want and wait for newer things to arrive, then sign up again

  • ... the most-shipped DVD ever was The Blind Side.

    Did not see that coming.

  • ... but sadly, netflix did not accept, most likely because it would mean sharing subscriber info and preferences with Redbox...

    Sad for netflix, the employees of the DVD rental service, redbox, the customers of both companies, and the environment.... A lose-lose-lose-lose all around, but such is the nature of business sometimes...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      Why most likely?

      Netflix can sell without the subscriber info. Not like the subscriber info is stamped on to the dvds.

  • It turns out the titles on the ones I received aren't typos: "The Loin King" and "Shaving Ryan's Privates"

  • Ahh, the good old days of 4 DVDs at a time. My server is full of Netflix DVD.. backups.

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