It’s officially over, bros. The final red envelope is going into the mail on September 29, 2023. Netflix announced Tuesday that they are permanently winding down the 25-year-old physical DVD business that actually made them a household name in the first place. Soon, you’ll own absolutely nothing on physical media, and you will be forced to stream whatever sanitized slop the algorithms choose for you.

Of course, the corporate PR team tried to put a sweet, sentimental spin on it. They hopped on Twitter to tell us it has been a "true pleasure and honor" to deliver movie nights for a quarter of a century. But let's look past the corporate tears and look at the actual spreadsheets. They aren't closing shop out of the goodness of their hearts; they're doing it because their business is hurting.

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos dropped a blog post trying to frame this as a calculated victory lap. He claimed that wrapping things up in 2023 as their "Final Season" is just a way to "go out on a high note" and maintain quality. Translation: the infrastructure is rotting, the margins are garbage, and they can’t afford to run a real shipping business anymore while trying to prop up their digital platform.

The real comedy happened after the market close on Tuesday. Netflix dropped their second-quarter earnings report, and it was a certified miss. Wall Street was not amused. The stock got absolutely hammered, dropping by around 6% in a matter of hours. When the investors start running for the hills, the first thing the suits do is cut the services that actually require real-world labor and shipping.

For 25 years, the red envelope was a based alternative to the digital panopticon. You got a physical disc, you put it in your player, and nobody could track your viewing habits in real-time or delete the movie from your hard drive because of a licensing dispute. It relied on the US Postal Service to bypass the digital gatekeepers. Now, that entire physical infrastructure is being dismantled to appease the quarterly earnings gods.

But that’s the modern corporate lifecycle for you. They build an empire on physical excellence, transition to a digital monopoly, and then start cutting features the moment their quarterly numbers don't meet expectations. A 6% drop in shares is all it takes for the executives to decide that your physical media privileges have officially expired.

So mark your calendars for late September. Once that last red envelope goes out, we enter the era of total digital dependency. If you want to watch something that isn’t approved by the current corporate focus groups, you’d better start building your physical media library now before the option is completely gone.

Sources: * U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Netflix Inc. Form 10-Q Quarterly Report for the Period Ended June 30, 2023 * Netflix Investor Relations, Q2 2023 Financial Statements and Shareholder Letter * United States Postal Service, Annual Report on Mail Volume and Delivery Operations, Fiscal Year 2023