Netflix DVD rentals have entered hospice care. Discuss!
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The announcement made for a sad moment in the house of @Vader, as we still get DVDs from Netflix.
In addition, there are a lot of people who have the DVD service because they live somewhere that cannot get internet that can handle streaming.
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Netflix DVD rentals have entered hospice care.
I wonder how RedBox is doing these days… (Edit: not great).
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After all, if you can stream decent quality video, why rent a disc?
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One of the things we like about Netflix DVD is that you can get both new releases and older stuff without having to sign up for 837 different streaming services.
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Because audio quality is just as important as video. Great you can stream in 4K (in theory) but the audio is still somewhere in the early 2000s
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I hope the final DVD sent is Beetlejuice.
Yeah, I still check out DVDs from the library, for example, so I don’t have to open multiple streaming accounts at one time.
In its peak years Netflix offered quite a selection, not just the new releases, but foreign and indie and silent era, etc. I watched a lot of hard-to-find movies through that service.
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A lot of streaming content does have 5.1 Dolby surround, but it’s compressed down to under 700Kbps, compared to the audio on a Blu-ray at 1.7Mbps.
Only real complaint I ever have about streaming surround sound is that the compression tends to move everything to the front so the sound is not as immersive as on disc.
Of course that can be a good thing on rare occasions, has anyone tried to watch The Good The Bad And The Ugly on Blu-ray with the surround audio? Who ever mixed it went nuts with randomly moving various sounds around the corners of the room, it was so distracting after about 20 minutes I switched to the original mono track and never tried the surround mix again.
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Because you can get just about any movie on disc, but there are a huge number of them that aren’t streaming at any given time.
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Don’t forget that streaming services can have their rights to show a movie expire at any moment. For example, for the upcoming Mutant Reviewers Seventies Science Fiction Theme Week, I decided to go with Damnation Alley. Turns out that the claim on IMDB of it being available on Tubi is outdated. Though I did manage to find it elsewhere. For those unfamiliar, here’s a mildly snarky one sentence plot summary. Future Airwolf Star and Future Alleged A-Team Star go on a road trip across post-apocalyptic America in an armored Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
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I’d call it more of a Megaweapon Lite.
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A Kiloweapon?
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I like that they built a real vehicle for Damnation Alley, though. Not quite as imposing as The Big Bus (1976), but a tad more agile.
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There were a lot of physical disks that were not part of the streaming service. So, you could get the odd stuff, or stuff that Netflix wasn’t allowed to stream.
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When I lived in a rural area, which technically was only a hundred or so miles north of San Francisco as the crow flies, being able to rent the DVDs was a huge deal. We didn’t have Internet. My family who live there now only have satellite internet which is massively limiting and you can’t use it to stream. This is going to be a crushing blow to the huge swaths of the country that doesn’t have access to high speed internet.
eta: sorry didn’t see that we were supposed to stop talking about it. i’ll stop now
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I never did the Netflix DVD rental thing, and now I’m kinda sorry that I never gave it a try.
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I’ve been a disc subscriber since July of aught-five, and have sent and received 1125 discs since then.
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On the other hand, getting MST3K DVDs from Netflix, as well as a few from my local library, years ago was how I first really became a fan of the show.
It does seem odd, though, that they don’t even offer DVDs of the seasons they bankrolled.
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