Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times' media reporter:In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending. The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes. "It's sad when you get to the end, because it's been a big part of all of our lives for so long," Hank Breeggemann, the general manager of Netflix's DVD division, said in an interview. "But everything runs its cycle. We had a great 25-year run and changed the entertainment industry, the way people viewed movies at home." When Netflix began mailing DVDs in 1998 - the first movie shipped was "Beetlejuice" - no one in Hollywood expected the company to eventually upend the entire entertainment industry... At its height, Netflix was the Postal Service's fifth-largest customer, operating 58 shipping facilities and 128 shuttle locations that allowed Netflix to serve 98.5 percent of its customer base with one-day delivery... Netflix's DVD operations still serve around one million customers, many of them very loyal... To ease the backlash, Netflix is allowing its DVD customers to hold on to their final rentals. "One hundred people at Netflix still work on the DVD side of the business, though most will soon be leaving the company."

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