Netflix Says the DVD Is Dead, Basically

Three million customers dropped Netflix's DVD-by-mail service in the last three months of 2011.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told reporters yesterday that he doesn't see DVDs playing much of a role in his company's future, despite them being the product upon which the online retailer was built. Just last summer, Hastings announced that he was essentially splitting Netflix in two, with Netflix remaining the service for streaming movies and television shows and Qwikster becoming the company's DVD-rental arm. But Hastings said that nearly 3 million customers unsubscribed from the DVD-by-mail service over the last three months of 2011, a trend he sees continuing in perpetuity. The company won't be spending any money to market the mail service, and will also shelve plans to rent video games by mail as well. While Blu-Ray sales remain as strong as ever, DVD sales have continued their march to obscurity with aplomb over the last year. Our completely uneducated (well, slightly educated, if you count two years working at a CD/DVD store) guess says the DVD will go the way of Betamax by... let's say... July 25, 2017.