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2.7 Million Americans Still Get Netflix DVDs in the Mail (cnn.com)
Remember when Netflix used to be a DVD-by-mail company? Well, for 2.7 million subscribers in the US, it still is. From a report: The familiar red envelopes have been arriving in customers' mailboxes since 1998 and helped earn the company a healthy $212 million profit last year. Why are so many people still using this old-school service in the age of streaming? There are a number of reasons. Streaming Netflix video requires a lot of bandwidth -- so much so that Netflix consumes 15% of all US internet bandwidth, according to a 2018 industry report. But many rural areas of the country remain without broadband access. The Federal Communications Commission estimates 24 million Americans fall on the wrong side of this digital divide. The US Postal Service, however, can reach every ZIP code with those red envelopes. One such customer is Dana Palmateer, who lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
"Streaming movies was a no-go, so I just went with the disc service that Netflix offers," she says. "As all of us are doing it in these parts." But Netflix also has plenty of DVD customers in urban areas who prefer the service for its convenience and selection of movies, spokeswoman Annie Jung says. "People assume that our customers must either be super seniors or folks that live in the boonies with no internet access," she says. "Actually, our biggest hot spots are the coasts, like the Bay Area and New York." In 2017, the number of people who subscribed to Netflix's DVD subscription was about 4 million.
"Streaming movies was a no-go, so I just went with the disc service that Netflix offers," she says. "As all of us are doing it in these parts." But Netflix also has plenty of DVD customers in urban areas who prefer the service for its convenience and selection of movies, spokeswoman Annie Jung says. "People assume that our customers must either be super seniors or folks that live in the boonies with no internet access," she says. "Actually, our biggest hot spots are the coasts, like the Bay Area and New York." In 2017, the number of people who subscribed to Netflix's DVD subscription was about 4 million.
There are a lot of obscure movies and documentaries which are still not easily available streaming. The one at a time plan is fine for me, and I can get any of the oddball stuff reasonably quickly, which is better than not at all.
The non-streaming catalog is (was) greater and does not disappear due to arbitrary license expirations. Breakage, non-replacement, and tailing-off of new purchases is what is driving down the service value now.
I have a streaming Netflix account, and I get the two DVDs at a time disc-in-the-mail service. The streaming is good for TV series and specialty Netflix material, but the range of films available for streaming is tiny compared to what's available on disc. Foreign films, documentaries, obscure films, so much stuff not available to stream. Probably licensing issues. So I do both.
I have a gigabit connection, but I prefer blu-rays for media. Streaming doesn't offer nearly the quality or selection. It's cheaper than signing up for a bunch of different streaming services too, especially if you're willing to wait for the TV stuff.
I have 60-100 movies and TV shows in my DVD queue at any given time. Netflix tells me which are streaming (to try to get me to sign up for their streaming service). There are easily less than 1% on my list available streaming at any given time. Their streaming catalog is almost useless to me.
I pay for 3 discs at a time, and I'd pay for 4 if they'd let me.
Originally had a 2-at-a-time disk subscription, in addition to the streaming. Basically, I'd rent the first few disks of a set, and decide whether it was worth buying or not.
But I dropped the disk subscription completely when I reached the point that every series I wanted to check was missing the first or second disk of the set. It's simpler to just buy what looks interesting when it pops up on sale at Walmart or Amazon (movies), or RightStuf (anime).
Though Netflix's service has deteriorated, and the DVD inventory is getting pretty poor. For example, only one or two seasons of a 8-season TV show. Even worse, a show that was most popular in its time, Cheers, is not even available on DVD from Netflix. Cheers!?!?!? Delivery time is up to two days in each direction now because distribution centers have been shut down. To me it looks as if Netflix is just soaking the DVD customers for all they can.
We have both a DVD and streaming subscription. There is a lot of content only available on DVD. We've basically watched the streaming content of interest, but have a long DVD queue we are slowing going through 1 disc at a time.
I have eclectic taste in movies and they're almost never available streaming. I always have a NFLX movie at home ready to watch and the titles will almost certainly never be available streaming.
Now that idiots at all the companies are all trying to make an exclusive streaming service that I'll never buy DVDs allow me to watch that content.
Rural communities sometimes lack access to good internet services, also some people just don't buy a internet package that can do streaming well. They are stuck with a bad DSL provider with varied speeds. Red Box's popular around my area and I see them used frequently. Were lucky to have access to a broadband provider which has good speed. We stream much of our content now.
But my wife a teacher has many students who has no internet at home because its probably too expensive.
Some, though perhaps not all of the 2.7 million are also actively choosing what they want to watch rather than selecting from a scroll-able menu, and many awesome movies from more than a year ago are just not available online. In these cases, there's the disk option. You can get it delivered to your office, or you can go to Bend, Oregon. Mil Gracias Netflix.
awesome, I have one right down the street from me. Nothing beats walking the aisles and finding a forgotten gem.
My wife still gets the dvd plan (streaming as well) since she likes to watch a lot of indie movies that aren't available for streaming.
There are SO many things I couldn't find on Netflix to stream... Random mentions of a 20-40 year old movie that "I gotta check out!", courtesy of a friend or co-worker, for example. But on physical DVD, they seem to have just about anything I can think of to rent.
I'm on the one at a time plan but I have kept it because there's still so much stuff not on streaming.
On top of that there's also the fact that if you care about picture quality, no streaming service that I'm aware of can match blurays right now, and even DVDs still often have better shadow quality in the shadows and other areas.
Presently here, but not there.
I've signed up with a DVD by mail company after waiting in vain for the next seasons of a few things I want to watch.
Who said she had a problem with that? Grow up.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
..when you are looking for an old movie that the local video stores do not have and it is not streaming.
They will have titles that other places don't.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
The explanation does not preclude the first or second assumption.
This summary seems to imply that most people just use the streaming service. But the streaming catalog is very limited. I just randomly searched and find that the Marvel movies aren't there (I looked for Iron Man - no 1, 2, or 3), I can't find anything Disney. I just looked up my favorite 80's classics (Ghostbusters, Back to the Future) and 90's (The Matrix).
When my wife persuaded me to purchase a "farm" at the end of a dirt road off of another dirt road off of a two-lane paved road 11 miles outside a 1-stop-light town, one of the things we knew was going to be a problem was internet. Fortunately, we found a local provider who would raise a small microwave tower on a part of the property (about the size of a front-yard flagpole, not a huge thing) and if we would pay for the electric hookup and monthly electric (about $15/mo) they'd let us have free internet. The tower is line-of-sight to a water tower in town, where the main transmitters are located and our tower provides local access to our house and a few neighbors by small transceivers on our houses. I'm pretty sure I don't want to start a streaming video business from the house, but we can watch Netflix, Prime, ESPN 3 with no problems so that's a win. The alternative was Hughesnet or one of their competitors.
Netflix's disc rental service gets newly released DVDs and Blurays long before the streaming side does (even though the studios have punished Netflix with several month delays to disc access compared to the discs being available at retail). And streaming availability comes and goes at the whims of the studio holders, where discs stay on the service until the physical media gets destroyed.
Why are so many people still using this old-school service in the age of streaming?
Probably because the selection of actual good movies on Netflix is almost non-existent? There are times browsing through Netflix to find a movie to watch that I wish I still had their DVD service, which (back when I used it) had a great movie selection.
I swear this was a thread like 2 months ago, not sure why these keep getting submitted.
I joined netflix in early 1999, Blockbuster had a miniscule DVD section at the time and the rule of VHS was just losing it's crown.
Netflix had a huge selection compared to them. I was on a 4 disk at a time plan until a couple years back (dropped to 2+Stream).
The thing is because of licensing and streaming rights, there's still a lot more content available on physical media vs streaming. The biggest issue now is that they don't seem to be replacing media for older things (or media is unavailable) so you get into situations with older shows where disk 1 of season 1 is no longer available and then some of the older media that shows up looks like it's been through the wringer. New release though they're still keeping stock coming in as it becomes available due to the OMG EXCLUSIVE OWN IT 10 WEEKS SOONER ON WHATEVER STEAMING LIBRARY IS FUNCTIONAL UNTIL IT SHUTS DOWN!!(Yeah we lost the DRM war peeps)
For streaming media I have Netflix, Prime and I cut to Hulu for Live a couple months ago.
It's ok, it's not a 100% functional replacement for something like cable, but it's good enough for me and I figure it'll get better.
I picked them over GoogleTV because Hulu has History Channel and YoutubeTV doesn't, DirectTV's streaming DVR thing is barely functional from what I hear (seriously people still watch TV not timeshifted?) and sling, I'm not sure how they're still a thing after the old slingbox fiasco... I thought they got sued into oblivion.
Net result for me was a $200 reduction in my cable bill and the primary driver for actually getting rid of cable at the end was signal quality.
Cox cable here where I am does a pretty harsh re-compresses on everything (way to high on the reduction factor guys and high motion high color? ugh someone preview the output at least) and they downmix the audio. I understand that it's an issue with the bandwidth available how they do catv signal delivery and they wont be able to to move into 2160p delivery without major changes to that infrastructure but hey, that's not my problem. That industry has known their limitations for more than a decade and haven't really decided to do anything about it.
My only technical complaint about hulu from a quality perspective is their audio delivery sample rate is close to borderline, but I'm not sure if that's how they get it from the upstream producers or if they mess with it. I have a fairly robust audio system in my main tv room and on that one I can hear the difference between a 192khz sample rate and lower and hulu is right at the edge on multichannel audio where I'll start to notice a tinny-ness like quality to it.
I still have the physical media Netflix sent me for the first cut of their streaming app for the ps3 somewhere.
First version you had to put the disk in there and boot it like a game.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
I almost forgot the old "Burn and Return" or "rip and flip" days. Sigh.
Just about all my movie and TV needs are met. THings are going out of print on DVD though, and I don't know what I'll do when physical media is no longer a thing.
12:50 - press return.
They offer Blu-ray.
Amazon sells all the physical DVDs already, and has the delivery infrastructure already. They could have a catalog with every movie in it, just by buying from their own inventory when someone wants to rent a previously-unrented DVD. And it'd be a great backup for their lackluster Prime video streaming selection.
Perhaps they're just afraid of cannibalizing their DVD sales.
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I used to get lots of AOL CDs in the mail which made great drink coasters. I'm getting low on coasters so I need to give Netflix my address.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Everything missing from streaming is on disc. You can get entire series or seasons at once. No streaming artifacts.
Twinstiq, game news
Realistically, I'm not sure if I should be counted or not, because I don't think we've had a DVD delivered from Netflix in at least 6 months...because that's how long we've had the same 2 discs sitting on the TV stand waiting to be watched ...
I take my laptop to the library, I rip the DVD in less than 30 minutes. I watch at home at me leisure.
Rinse repeat.
2.1 million Americans still have AOL Dial-up internet service.
Ken
Well, I did anyway until a little over a year ago. I wasn't really paying attention to my bill closely and I was wondering what they would charge me for the disc I couldn't return because I couldn't find it. AFAIK, they didn't charge me for it when I cancelled, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention closely enough.
I hadn't mailed discs for quite a while before I cancelled. I can't keep up with the streaming stuff. Some of it's great, some mediocre. It's a lot of stuff though.
And some of it's mindless garbage. Of course they had to come up with a cartoon version of Trailer Park Boys. It makes the first season of the live show look sophisticated. I can't believe Julian has been milking the same rum and coke for nearly 20 years.
And how does Bubbles know the the difference between the smell of bear shit and the smell of samsquatch shit anyway?
How many of the 2.7 million are due to "grandfather clause" with "Unlimited devices" when you paid the extra for streaming.....::cough:: 2004!
I've nothing of importance to say, now go away before I taunt you with a second sig!
Special features aren't usually available with streaming options -- commentary tracks, behind the scenes features, deleted scenes, etc...
My assumption is that discs are a dying option because pirating them is trivial and storing the copies is getting cheaper.