LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – After a quarter century of Netflix customers renting physical DVDs in the mail, the streaming company will be ending the red envelope service on Friday. 

“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced. “So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023.” 

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According to the streaming service, the practice “paved the way for the shift to streaming.” 

“We feel so privileged to have been able to share movie nights with our DVD members for so long, so proud of what our employees achieved and excited to continue pleasing entertainment fans for many more decades to come,” Sarandos said in a statement. 

According to Netflix, Beetlejuice was the first DVD ever shipped by the program on March 10, 1998.  While more than 5.2 billion DVDs were shipped, the most popular title was “The Blind Side.” During the 25 year program, Netflix reported 40 million unique subscribers. 

Fortunately, for Netflix customers who still enjoy the experience of renting physical disks as Redbox has announced a special deal for those with the Netflix subscription. The “Show Us Your Red Envelope” will be on X (formerly known as Twitter) and offer customers Sept. 29 through Oct. 1 the ability to respond to Redbox on social media for the chance to receive a free movie night. 

“Redbox continues to be a destination for millions of consumers, and we’re thrilled to expand our kiosk offerings to include hard-to-find titles and classic movies that everyone enjoys,” said William J. Rouhana, Jr., chief executive officer and chairman of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. “We are expanding our content offerings at approximately 29,000 kiosks to include third-party studio titles and new movies such as Barbie and Oppenheimer, which will be available in the coming months. I look forward to hearing from former DVD.com customers on the titles they want to see at our kiosks.”

On Friday morning, Netflix ushered in one final farewell as it shipped its final DVD to watchers everywhere, thanking them for the many years of devotion, showing how the movies were ordered and packaged before being shipped to a customer’s home. 

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The company shared some additional statistics about the service, including the fact that the only non-red envelope shipped was “Shrek,” the highest volume of DVDs shipped in a day was 4.9 million, and in 2019 customers helped cross the 5 billion copies rented of the movie “Rocketman.” 

The closing text of the short video, “Farewell to the era when Netflix came in the mail,” the video said, “Thanks for watching.” 

To see the farewell, watch here.