![]() (The piece was either promoted or originally titled, before an all-too-revealing namechange to something catchier and more recognizable, "Remember the long tail?" Apparently not.) Adams references an article and book from the early zeroes (in the spirit of the general intransigence that led me to keep skirting streaming in favor of renting physical discs, I still won't call that era the aughts): ".on-demand manufacturing and digital distribution would disrupt the winner-take-all logic of monopoly capitalism and allow businesses to profit by making a nigh-infinite variety of products available to any audience, however small." The cultural trajectory of my own youth was in many ways the peaking and waning of this phenomenon - so in addition to the more generalized obituaries of Adams and others, I'd like to offer a few of my own personal reflections at the graveside. Sam Adams has already written a piece that articulates most of what I'd want to observe: "The Death of Netflix DVD Marks the Loss of Something Even Bigger". ![]() This quiet termination, long expected among those of us aware it hadn't already happened, is indicative of much broader cultural trends. Much of my own work for the past fifteen years of this site - a period that parallels Netflix's own gradual shift away from its original model - would have been far more difficult and even impossible without access to a catalog far more vast than anything offered by a single streaming service (or even a collective sampling of many individual subscriptions). Some time around the middle of the last decade, while I stubbornly persisted with this practice, most of my friends and family would appear surprised when they spotted the envelope, or heard me reference "getting a Netflix".as if this could mean anything besides picking up a remote control and pressing a button. As with so many of these mercurial changes, it's hard to say exactly when "Netflix" came to mean streaming from a number of quite limited titles rather than choosing a rental from a vast library of physical media and receiving that object from the company. Although the closure received buzz in the past few months since it was announced, the vast majority of Netflix users - streaming subscribers, if it even needs to be said - likely have no idea that the postal service was still delivering those once-famous red envelopes at this late date (and technically, still will be as the last stray scarlet survivors reach their now-permanent homes early next week). ![]() Netflix's DVD mailing service ends today, and my last disc ( Carmen Jones) was sent a few days ago. ![]()
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