The End of Netflix DVD Rentals

I’ll re-post what I said in the gripe thread…
I’m glad I ‘Backed up’ all of my movies & TV shows back in the day. I burned them originally onto DVD-R discs when hard drives were only Gigabytes in size. Now that hard drives are Terabytes in size, I’ve backed them up onto several Terabyte hard drives drives, as well as a RAID Server for posterity :grin:

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They used to! Back around 2013-14, I got several from Netflix, and even a few from Blockbuster’s short-lived disc-by-mail service, since they had some that Netflix didn’t. I’m wishing now I’d kept the mailing envelopes, should have framed them for posterity.

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Same here! The MST3K’s Netflix didn’t have I found on eBay.
I would re-sell them after backing them up.

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Toward the end -for me- the writing was on the wall.

I was getting more cracked discs, more on the “very long wait” list, which came to mean “Your sh-- out of luck”. With the kind of movies I was watching that’s about all I had in my que, so I called customer service (which was actually one of rare, really good customer service calls I’ve ever made) and the woman explained that these were not available at my nearest distribution centers, and I responded that I was fine with waiting, just wanted to watch them. So, she sent me the next 3 or 4 on my list, which came from across the country, but after that -zip-

I wasn’t going to keep calling every week, so I just cancelled it.

I’ve read that their stock has been dwindling, a lot of movies were disappearing from the site of late. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it has.

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I experienced my share of cracked discs too. A certain amount of that was to be expected, but it did feel like it increased over time. Probably a combination of discs cracked by customers not being inspected/retired, and breakage in transit.

I’m curious to see what happens after the service is gone. I was amazed to watch Blockbuster’s death as it happened. The two certainly provided similar services, but not indentical. One allowed you to go pick up a movie right this minute, the other let you have one in 2-3 days.

Streaming’s all well and good if you’re satisfied with watching something they happen to offer at this moment, but it’s rarely useful if you’re wanting to watch a specific movie, especially something obscure.

It seems to me there’s demand for all three services, I’d like to see them coexist: I’ve got my obscure 1940’s German film in a disc queue, it’ll show up eventually. Meanwhile I want to watch, say, Babylon tonight, so I’ll go out and rent it. And later in the week if I feel like watching something but nothing specific, there’s streaming.

(I guess there’s technically a fourth option: renting digitally ala Amazon, but that’s subject to the same whims as streaming. Rental stores can’t hold infinite inventory, but physical media doesn’t just evaporate. It either gets shuffled around to other stores or eventually sold to someone who wants it.)

There’d be more than a little schadenfreude involved; I can spend time trying to chase down which streaming service has Babylon, learning it’s one I don’t subscribe to, realizing I’ve already used the free trial subscription so now it’s $15 to sign up and watch the movie, or just call to confirm the disc is in stock tonight and go rent it for $5.

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Just for curiosity, I went to see if I could log into my old Netflix account and there’s no record of it anymore…
Even though my Firefox saved my email and login credentials: “Sorry, we can’t find an account with this email address. Please try again or create a new account” :open_mouth:
Oh well :person_shrugging:

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I buy my own dvds. Garage sales and flea markets, mostly, and rarely more than a buck or two apiece. Because sometimes I want to watch 3 Days of the Condor, or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, or Valley of Gwangi and good luck finding stuff like that when you want it.



That’s maybe one tenth of them, and no DAVFLIX won’t lend them out.

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I was left with literally hundreds of DVDs when my dad died (not counting all the ones he did off of TV with an in-line DVD burner he bought). I just sold them off or gave them away. I don’t have room for any of that.

I also inherited thousands of records and CDs. I sold maybe 5% of the collection on eBay over 3 years and finally gave up and gave them all away.

Don’t foist your collections on your kids, folks.

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Pfft. My kid took off to college with my Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection dvds. Don’t gank your folks’ collections, kids!

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Does this mean that I get to keep the copy of Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot that I have been meaning to return since 2010?

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I can safely say that even if I wanted some of the DVDs, I wouldn’t have taken them. It just wasn’t worth going through everything and picking and choosing. I’ve become very zen about possessions. I’d rather lose them than acquire new ones at this point.

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That depends. I’m not giving up my Encino Man dvd, but I’d yell “pull” for a Stallone movie.

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The only DVDs I get rid of are the ones I watch and don’t like, or the ones I have duplicates of (because I forgot I had them and bought them again.)

Same with CDs.

Some people hoard food and weapons for the coming apocalypse. I hoard entertainment.

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Hoard all you want. Just don’t force your descendants to take care of it with no provisions in your will. He basically took me aside one day when he was still alive and told me it would all be my responsibility after he was gone as if I wanted to devote an entire garage-sized room in my house to records, CDs and DVDs like he did. I’m still stuck with boxes full of Chaplin and King Kong memorabilia in my attic.

I admit the eBay sales were enough to live on for a while and we got a few thousand from auctioning off the coin collection. The stamps were almost worthless though.

I’m not trying to discourage anyone from collecting DVDs or anything else. I just want people to be responsible with what to do with their collections after they die.

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There are a couple of stores in my area that sell used CDs and DVDs, and I always wonder where the good stuff is. It seems like they always have 10 copies of the worst album by every artist who ever lived.

In the old days it was understandable… people kept their good CDs and sold the crap. But nowadays people are replacing their entire CD collections with streaming (and before that with MP3s)… so what are they doing with all their good CDs?

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Frisbee?

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I remember tossing 5.25 floppy discs like Frisbees back in the 80s :rofl:

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Yup. We just upgraded our cloud drive to 10TB. It’s RAID enabled. I also manually back up everything on another external drive because redundancy!

I have 15 DVDs that are special that I will rip to MKV then not sell or donate. 4 are the MST3K Shout Factory Volume XVI that I found at our local Disk Replay (used movies and game store) that still had the little Tom Servo! I am loathe to get rid of that. I already had the movies, but I paid $60 to get that little Servo. :purple_heart:

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I knew we had 2 or 3 somewhere from back in the day. I FOUND THEM!

Definitely going to frame one and put it in our bar! Anyone want the other 2?? :grin:

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I have a 36TB Raid server and that’s close to full. Might need to upgrade it in the future.

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