Greater than sixteen years after pivoting to streaming, Netflix is saying goodbye to its mail-order DVD enterprise. The corporate plans to shutter the service by the tip of September, it introduced on Tuesday.

Ah, the place has the time gone?

Netflix debuted greater than 25 years in the past, and at first it each rented and offered DVDs on-line (through a now-ancient-looking web site). The corporate would possibly’ve light to irrelevance way back had it not switched focus to streaming in 2007.

About 4 years later, amid backlash over deliberate worth hikes, Netflix mentioned it will spin off its mail-order arm right into a separate enterprise, which it (bizarrely) named “Qwikster.” Then, the corporate modified its thoughts. The spinoff plan mirrored simply how far Netflix had include its streaming enterprise. Nevertheless, its execution of this concept was, frankly, fairly embarrassing.

In a eulogy on the corporate’s weblog, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos pointed to the dwindling income it earns through mailed-order DVDs, and mentioned: “To everybody who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a purple envelope to reach: thanks.”

Sarandos added, “we need to exit on a excessive, and shall be delivery our remaining discs on September 29, 2023.”

Netflix’s DVD rental income slipped to $100 million in 2022, down from the $200 million or so the corporate earned the prior yr. At one level, Netflix’s DVD library featured greater than 100,000 titles — vastly greater than what the corporate gives through streaming within the U.S., per aggregator JustWatch.