Where is the Netflix original? Footage at risk as company spins down DVD service
Madeline Fry Schultz
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When Netflix began in 1997, it wasn’t the streaming behemoth it is now. No one had created Stranger Things or Wednesday or Bridgerton. Netflix was the couch potato’s alternative to Blockbuster — instead of driving down to the store to rent a DVD, which would hopefully be in stock, you could pick it from Netflix’s library ahead of time and have it delivered directly to your doorstep.
Once the streaming era dawned and Netflix became better known for ubiquitous password-sharing, original shows, and “Netflix and chill,” its DVD service just wasn’t as popular anymore. Why wait three days for a DVD to arrive when you could watch something else online right now? Better yet, you could binge an entire TV series.
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Netflix announced this week that it would end its DVD service this fall. When Netflix DVDs peaked in 2010 (a year that brought us such films as The King’s Speech, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1, and Eat Pray Love), some 20 million users had the ability to have DVDs delivered to their mailboxes.
“Those iconic red envelopes changed the way people watched shows and movies at home — and they paved the way for the shift to streaming,” Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said. “To everyone who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a red envelope to arrive: thank you.”
The news is sad for the old souls and the technology-skeptical among us. But it also has another implication besides the decline of physical media. DVDs are relics not just because they represent an older form of technology, but also because they can’t be changed — unlike shows that exist only on Netflix.com.
For years, the streaming giant has allowed directors to edit their work retroactively. In 2020, mere hours after Juno star Ellen Page announced that she was now “Elliot” (a biological female identifying as a transgender man), Netflix went through and altered the credits on various TV shows, even changing Page’s name in the title credits to the first season of The Umbrella Academy, which Page starred in nearly two years before coming out as transgender.
Netflix also allowed the Duffer brothers, the creative minds behind Stranger Things, to edit various bits of the show. Last year, they admitted to editing the show to fix an inconsistency in which the creators had clearly forgotten a character’s birthday, but “we have [edited] things also that people don’t know about,” Matt Duffer said.
Ross Duffer added, “You do have the physical copies, though, the Blu-rays and stuff — you’d have to compare.”
With Disney also editing its old content and even authors such as Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie getting a facelift from their publishers, there’s no reason to trust that your favorite movies and books growing up will be the same 20 years on. This makes the loss of DVDs a loss for all of us. You just can’t replace physical copies.