Netflix to End DVD Rental Business After 25 Years: “The Business Continues to Shrink”

Tsing

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Netflix has revealed that it will be winding down DVD.com later this year, marking an end to the DVD rental business that defined the streamer during its early days, before streaming media and video on demand took over. In a blog post titled "Netflix DVD - The Final Season," co-CEO Ted Sarandos thanked everyone who had tried the service, explaining that Netflix will be shipping its final discs on September 29, 2023, due to the reduced relevance of DVDs. According to an image that Netflix shared, Beetlejuice was the first DVD that the company ever shipped, on March 10, 1998, while the most popular title was The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock.

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I used it all the way up until I got Starlink a couple of years ago. When your internet is sucky and it's hard to stream stuff, it was a nice option to have. Rip and park on plex, and that was a nice thing to be able to do too. That, and they would have a lot of titles you just couldn't find streaming. Kinda sad to see it go.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
I totally get that. It's another reason I've been working on building up my 4K and BD/DVD server library recently.
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When I got married, in 2012, I already had the DVD service, and the wife loaded up the queue. We both kinda added to it over the years, and DVDs came and went in the mail. WHen you only get 1 DVD a week and you are adding stuff to the queue over time, it takes a good bit to chew through.

And eventually, about 2 and a half years ago, we finally got through our queue. And once we finally got the ability to stream in something better than 480 resolution, we finally just dropped it.

Although, now... with nVidia's RTX Video and VLC support - all those old DVD rips might look a lot better...
 
Brian_B said:
RTX Video and VLC support
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Kind of makes me wonder if they plan to upgrade the Shield to some kind of RTX version since they haven't really done anything with it in a while. I love mine and I'm using it as a cheap Plex server (still have to finish configuring that but using VLC to watch our 4K HDR rips) with a 14 TB HDD attached.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Kind of makes me wonder if they plan to upgrade the Shield to some kind of RTX version since they haven't really done anything with it in a while.
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Which one do you have? I don't know much about the Shield devices and I've never used one, but I've read that they have something similar.

All right, found it: "In 2019, an early version of this technology was released with SHIELD TV. It was a breakthrough that improved streamed content targeted for TVs, mostly ranging from 480p to 1080p, and optimized for a 10-foot viewing experience."
— Pixel Perfect: RTX Video Super Resolution Now Available (NVIDIA Blog)

And also the AI Upscaling support page for the Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/support/shield-tv/ai-upscaling/

None of that is new though, and I'd imagine it's old news to you by now. Nvidia does point out in the blog that RTX Video Super Resolution is targeting PC users, who typically sit much closer to their displays. The extra processing power it requires is probably undesirable for a portable streaming device, where it may not result in a perceptible improvement of quality. That's my assumption.
 
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