Netflix will end its DVD service after 25 years
I have fond memories of the Netflix DVD service. In high school, I would get a disk, immediately burn a copy, and return it the same day. I could get about 20-25 DVDs a month on the 3-DVD plan this way.Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive.At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and I was rewarded a free month.After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard drives started getting large enough that I could just store all the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final transition.I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays, with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many movies barely elicits a shrug.But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world. Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.