The Former Netflix DVD Library Is a Lost Treasure We’ll Never See Again

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. 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. 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.

And 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. Rest assured, Netflix still sends DVDs to its subscribers—myself included—by mail. But the scope of that film library has shrunk precipitously, reflecting a lack of interest both from the company and the moviegoing public. In the face of easy, instant access via streaming, consumers were simply all too happy to sacrifice comprehensiveness. 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. 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.

At 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. Upwards of 50 distribution centers around the country ran the operation, which The Motley Fool reported last year had shrunk to only 17 outlets. 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. It’s such a minor part of the business, however, that Netflix has stopped even reporting DVD.com subscription numbers in the last few years, although that number is likely well under 2 million today. The streaming version of Netflix, meanwhile, reached 203.7 million paid subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2020.

By any metric, it’s plain to see that the DVD.com service isn’t receiving much attention. In years past, Netflix’s quarterly earnings statements contained data on expenditures toward purchasing DVDs and Blu-rays for the service, which were as high as $77 million in 2016. That quickly dropped to $54 million in 2017, and only $38.5 million in 2018. In 2019, the company stopped reporting this figure, as it had apparently become too miniscule to bother including. CEO Reed Hastings told reporters in 2018 that he had no immediate plans to shutter the service, but the signs of entropy are all there. It might not happen tomorrow, but DVD.com’s days are surely numbered. The service has become a relic, operating with little interest even from its parent company. The size and scope of its physical film library continues to dwindle. And when it finally closes up shop, we’ll have lost the last vestiges of what was once the greatest and broadest movie library ever assembled.

The shrinking of the physical Netflix DVD library has been a simple enough process to observe for customers who are paying attention to their queue of upcoming deliveries. As the years have gone by, I’ve watched my own queue be decimated by this process, with titles first moving from “queue” to “saved” (essentially a request that Netflix obtain a DVD they no longer have), to then disappearing from the service entirely. Many films I borrowed from Netflix in the last decade no longer show up at all when searched at DVD.com, and they’re exactly the sort of movies you would expect to see disappearing—cult films, foreign films, obscure titles, B-movies, etc. It’s the kind of stuff you can imagine an exec reasoning that “no one would miss,” presumably sold off over the last decade as various shipping/storage centers and warehouses have been consolidated. These types of films were clearly never the engine that drove the service, even in its glory days—but access to these obscure or unusual titles was the primary reason I first signed up for the DVD delivery service, along with other weirdo, kindred spirit film geeks. Over time, DVD.com has become less and less useful for this purpose.