We tend to forget, but Netflix only started video streaming in 2007. Before that, the American company competed with DVD rental stores by sending movies by mail to its customers. So Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental service, and guess what: it still is.
Declining but stable for two years
However, the company no longer highlights the results of this division in its quarterly financial reports, considering itself primarily as a streaming service. It will therefore have been necessary to read between the lines of the last report to learn that mail-order rental, an activity which has only ever been guaranteed in the United States, brought in $ 200 million for Netflix in 2021, the same result as 'in 2020.
For comparison, this figure was 400 million in 2018, showing a clear decline in this activity, reflecting the inexorable decline of this market. Note that in the United States, Netflix is one of the last two companies in this sector with Redbox, the pandemic having been right in 2021 for Family Video.
