Staten Island Republican makes impassioned plea to Netflix asking them to bring back DVD-by-mail service

A Staten Island Republican has written a letter to the CEO of Netflix imploring the streaming giant to bring back its DVD-by-mail service because it “filled a vital gap for seniors and technophobes.”

New York City GOP councilman Frank Morano has called on Netflix to turn back time and bring back the iconic red envelopes after the postal service was discontinued by the company in 2023.

“Streaming is wonderful, but it is not everything,” Morano wrote in the letter to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, the Staten Island Advance reports.

“DVDs filled a vital gap for seniors and technophobes, film lovers and collectors, and consumers with limited broadband access,” Marano said. “For many, those little red envelopes weren’t just discs — they were lifelines to cinema.”

Laying out his case, Morano stated that the DVDs allowed “any household with a mailing address” to be part of “the cinematic conversation.”

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“Ending it may have made sense to accountants, but to ordinary people, it felt like the curtain closed on an era that still had a full house applauding,” Morano said.

The service was “one of the most democratic forms of entertainment distribution America has ever known -- any household with a mailing address could be part of the cinematic conversation,” he added.

The Republican suggested that Netflix relaunch the service in a “streamlined” format that could serve the communities who need it most, the outlet reported.

Netflix announced it was stopping the service in April 2023 after 25 years.

“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” the company’s CEO said in a press release at the time.

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The DVD service’s history dates back to 1997 when Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph went to a post office in Santa Cruz, California, to mail a Patsy Cline compact disc to his friend and fellow co-founder Reed Hasting.

Randolph wanted to test whether a disc could be delivered through the U.S. Postal Service without being damaged, hoping eventually to do the same thing with the still-new format that became the DVD.

The Patsy Cline CD arrived at Hastings’ home unblemished, prompting the duo in 1998 to launch a DVD-by-mail rental website that they always knew would be supplanted by even more convenient technology.

With just a little over five months of life remaining, the DVD service has shipped more than five billion discs across the U.S. – the only country it ever operated.

Additional reporting by agencies