Confessions of a Netflix DVD Dead-Ender

The first set of DVDs that Netflix mailed to my apartment consisted of Pedro Almodóvar’s camp classic Dark Habits, the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, and the Nicolas Cage action vehicle Con Air. That was 14 years and more than 500 DVDs ago, according to the data preserved on my account. Why those three films? I couldn’t tell you. What I can say is that I remain as loyal to my Netflix DVD account as I was when I first signed up, in 2009. At the time, the company had already been offering streaming content for two years. But, to the bafflement of friends and family, I’ve stuck with the movies-by-mail service through its long decline and will do so until, as the company recently announced, it shuts down on September 29.

The demise of Netflix’s snail-mail service, or DVD.com, as it’s now formally known, is not a shock. The company is coy about subscriber numbers, but given that DVDs account for less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue, there can’t be many of us left. The company made major news back in 2011 when it considered spinning off its DVD business as a new company called Qwikster. Now hardly anyone will notice when those once-iconic red envelopes stop arriving in the mail. (If I have a DVD at home when the site shuts down, do I just get to keep it? The company’s emails haven’t said.)

Why have I stuck it out? I do share the concerns voiced by movie-buff streaming critics about the disposable quality of nonphysical media, the degradation in image quality, the fact that streaming titles can be removed from existence, and the number of classic films that are not available at all on streaming. But my Luddism is less principled. I stream plenty of movies, and listen to most of my music on Spotify these days. The real reason I stuck it out was the queue. Netflix allows DVD subscribers to save titles to a list of films, which are then sent in the order in which you added them. I’ve grown very attached to this system, and I’m not looking forward to its disappearance. At one point, I had more than 200 movies in my queue—years’ worth of viewing, especially after I switched from three discs at a time to one. Even as I started adding more streaming to my movie diet, I kept one strict rule: If there was a new DVD waiting for me from Netflix, I had to watch that first. Long day at work and not really in an Ingmar Bergman mood? Too bad, buddy. You-from-eight-months-ago thought you should watch The Silence, so that’s what you’re watching.

Read: Netflix crossed a line

Netflix’s DVD business will probably be remembered as a bridge technology. As the company’s co–chief executive Ted Sarandos recently put it, the mail service “paved the way for the shift to streaming.” I don’t think that’s quite right. As anachronistic as it now seems to rent a movie from a video store, that was basically an analog version of what we have now. You would browse through titles arranged by section, pick one, and then, usually, watch it right away. The queue is something different—less a way station between rentals and streaming than an unexpected detour. You might decide one day on a whim that you’re in the mood for a Fassbinder or a Fast & Furious, but if you get your DVDs in the mail, you won’t be able to watch it for a couple of days. If you used my demented system, you wouldn’t be able to watch it for years.

As such, classic Netflix serves as a kind of time capsule. The viewing options available to you on any given night aren’t a reflection of what you’re in the mood for that night. They’re a reflection of what you were in the mood for a few days, weeks, or, in extreme cases, years ago. When I would wonder, say, why Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street had arrived in the mail that day, I would remember that about a year earlier I had watched Fuller’s Shock Corridor and wanted to see more. When I added a movie to the queue, I was leaving a small gift for my future self, along with a record of what I was feeling, thinking, and experiencing when I made the selection. The rate at which I consumed new titles declined precipitously right around the time the instructional video Laugh and Learn About Childbirth appeared in the queue.

Modern media streaming, whether on category-killing superpowers such as Netflix and Amazon or high-brow options such as the Criterion Channel and Mubi, is a marvel that blows away any previous options. But there’s a certain relationship to art and time that will be lost when the last red envelope goes back into the mailbox. The only question for me now is what my final disc will be. These days, the selection is getting pretty thin, as the company seems to be retiring titles. More and more movies are getting tagged with the dreaded “very long wait” label, which means they won’t show up for weeks or months, and I don’t have that kind of time.  Looking at my queue, contenders include the Marlon Brando–directed One-Eyed Jacks; Lars von Trier’s postapocalyptic debut, The Element of Crime; and Gaspar Noe’s bonkers-looking psychedelic freakout Climax. Or I may just watch Con Air again, for old time’s sake.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/Ar1svnB