Ending an era.

[hannah]

I've just gotten an email from Netflix informing me they're cancelling their DVD subscription service at the end of this coming September. I'm dissatisfied with this for many reasons, ranging from the petty "I'm still on an old plan that's no longer offered" to the gargantuan "this is a heavy blow for reliable access to movies."

There's only two things to do.

Blog about it, and upgrade my plan to blaze through the remains of my queue.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

That's sad to hear, though I can't say I'm surprised. They were clearly cutting back on the service some years back when we cancelled it. You're right about how not having a DVD service past something like Redbox -- which focuses on big and recent hits -- is going to make watching films a lot harder. There are still local mom and pops who do specialize in harder to find content, but I know all of ours went out of business either right before or during the pandemic.

[isis]

Huh, for some reason I thought they did this years ago!

[gillo]

How are the mighty fallen. It hardly seems like five minutes since DVDs were the latest thing, and correspondingly expensive. I still like to own DVDs of films/shows that matter to me.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Any service that charges you for access to entertainment which you cannot save should be treated only as a fleeting amusement, not as a reliable archive. This is a problem when much of the industry is trending that way, which connects with the larger problem of society switching from one-time purchases to "service agreements" that become ongoing expenses. That makes it harder to balance a budget in addition to undermining access.

It's a good argument for purchasing hardcopies of anything you really care about.

[takes_a_fairy]

I’ve been slowly accumulating DVD sets of the things I know I’ll watch again, more than twice or thrice.

I’m already fed up with the requirements for channel subscriptions just to revisit older shows, or having had free access to them change to rental or purchase only, without notice, just to name a few bothersome things.