I had Netflix around 1999 and I lived close to one of their shipping centers. The turn around time was about two days and I could request three DVDs at a time. It was glorious. Huge selection of awesome DVD movies. All sorts of stuff you would never find in a rental store. Sad that you can't stream those great movies now but I'm still a Netflix subscriber.

What's even more sad is they are blocking VPNs and have more of the actually good shows only available in the UK. I'd like to see them fix their multinational deals better. Going to have to find alternative means soon.

That service still exists for $5-12/month (dvd.netflix.com) for 1-2 discs at a time.

And unfortunately, now that they've killed the local DVD rental business (Redbox aside), they're letting their own DVD rentals steadily decline with more and more titles no longer available to rent.

It's pretty much gotten to the point where, if there's an older/less popular movie you may want to watch, there's a good chance you'll need to just buy it.

Not in its current incarnation - it was more of a DVD rental delivery service with banner ads on warez sites.

The streaming/cloud tech company sort of came later.

Yup. Shifting to streaming then content creation does make sense, yet the fact that they've successfully steered such shift in this scale is amazing.