What was the first DVD ever sent out by Netflix?
Netflix has come a long way since it was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in 1997 as an online video rental company aiming to compete with bricks-and-mortar giant Blockbuster. 27 years later, Blockbuster has gone out of business, having led the media rental market since the late 1980s, and Netflix sits atop the TV streaming table.
Not only is it the most popular video streaming platform with over 277 million subscribers worldwide, 77 million more than its closest rival, but it’s generally considered the best platform in terms of value for money and range of programming. The platform’s pivot towards video streaming began in 2007, around the time that Spotify was trying to break into the music industry with a similar business model. Netflix also doubled down on streaming by being the first platform to commission its own shows, beginning with House of Cards in 2011.
Yet before the growth of streaming as a viable alternative to selling physical media or digital downloads, Netflix was already established as a very different kind of business. They started online, yes, but not with a service offering downloadable or streamable media. Their website rented hard-copy DVDs of movies, just like Blockbuster did.
Netflix’s initial advantage was that it allowed people to order DVDs from the comfort of their own homes, which could be delivered to them in the post. They didn’t have to go to a physical shop to rent. And Netflix’s returns process was more flexible than Blockbuster’s, which was the USP that inspired Hastings to start the business in the first place.
Even after the company established itself as the world’s leading video streamer, it didn’t stop shipping those DVDs. Over a 25-year period, it sent out more than 5.2 billion of them. That is, until it shut down the service in September 2023, by which point it no longer made financial sense.
So, what was the very first Netflix rental?
Netflix shipped the first DVD rented online via its website in 1998, just a year after the DVD itself was launched as a video-playing format. The lucky customer had made their choice from Netflix’s 925 film titles available for rental at the time and had their order processed by one of the site’s 30 initial employees.
The movie they’d chosen was Tim Burton’s 1988 horror-comedy Beetlejuice, which had only grown in popularity during the decade following its release. The film’s current status as a cult classic is in large part down to video rentals, in which Netflix obviously had a hand.
These days, if you want to watch Beetlejuice at home you’ll probably have to stream it, but not from Netflix. Although the platform did have the movie on their roster in the recent past, it’s now only available for free on Netflix’s biggest competitor Amazon Prime Video.
Ironically, Amazon tried to repurchase Netflix in the 1990s, at which point Hastings delivered the retail giant’s boss, Jeff Bezos, a big fat “no” from his seat on the flight he was travelling on at the time. And the two have been best of enemies ever since. Competitive, much?
