The company's founder, Reed Hastings, has often said that he created Netflix after movie rental company Blockbuster charged him $40 to return "Apollo 200" six weeks late.
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It was then that he came up with the idea of creating a subscription-based DVD-by-mail service that would allow the customer to keep the film for as long as they wanted.
Once viewed, the DVD was placed in a prepaid envelope and returned.
“In 1998, we shipped our first DVD. This morning we shipped our last,” the company said on its website this Friday.
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“For 25 years, we have redefined the way people watch movies and series at home and shared the excitement of opening their mailboxes with our iconic red envelopes,” the statement adds.
In April, when the decision to stop DVD rentals was announced, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said these “iconic” couriers “changed the way people consume shows and movies at home and paved the way for shift to streaming.”
On its website, the company indicated that the mail service has accumulated 40 million subscribers, mainly in the United States.
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The streaming platform currently has 238 million subscribers worldwide.
Netflix noted that the first film sent by mail was the comedy “Beetlejuice” and that it has since shipped more than 5,2 billion DVDs.
The most rented was the American sports drama “The Blind Side”, starring Sandra Bullock, a film about a white family that takes in a homeless black boy, released in 2009, when the DVD service was at the height of its popularity.
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