Lovefilm

» see lovefilm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

lovefilm never reached turkey at meaningful scale. the dvd-by-post category in europe was a uk, ireland and nordic story. by 2007 in ankara, video rental was a stack of pirated dvds at the corner shop, and by 2010 it was already wholesale torrents over the ttnet line. nobody i knew waited for a red envelope in the post.

the company itself started in 2002 in london as the merger of a few small uk dvd-rental startups, with graham bosher and alex chesterman as the names that stuck. for the first decade it ran the same loop as netflix in the us, set a queue of films on your account, the next one in line gets posted to your address, you watch it and post the disc back in the same envelope. by 2010 it had around two million subscribers across the uk, ireland, sweden, norway, denmark and germany, with the disc-by-post side still doing most of the revenue.

amazon had been buying in for a while. it took an initial stake through the 2008 ad-buy paper trail, and on january 20 2011 it completed the full acquisition at a reported two hundred million pound mark. the brand stayed lovefilm on the uk side for another three years while the streaming half got renamed lovefilm instant. then in february 2014 amazon folded instant into prime video, ended the lovefilm streaming name, and let the dvd side run on its own as lovefilm by post.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the disc loop worked for the same reason netflix worked. broadband in the uk was uneven through the late 2000s, especially outside london. a 4.7 gb dvd in the post got you the film at quality the buffer-prone iplayer of the era could not match. the catalog at peak was around 70,000 titles, which was deeper than most physical rental shops could ever hold on a shelf.

the second engine was post-office logistics. royal mail had a flat-rate first-class envelope that fit a dvd case with a return slip. lovefilm built turnaround times of two to three days end to end on most of the country. the queue was the addictive bit, you sat there reordering it from your browser at the office and the next morning your mail box had a film you had picked four weeks earlier and forgotten about.

~ how it actually ended ~

amazon cut scandinavia in 2013 with three months notice to subscribers and a small refund on prepaid balances. the official line was that disc rental in those markets had stopped scaling. the real picture was that netflix had landed in the nordics in late 2012 and was eating the streaming half of the customer base on lovefilm's own roadmap.

by 2017 the disc business was a slow tail of older customers who had not switched to streaming. on october 16 amazon notified lovefilm by post subscribers that the service would close on the last day of the month. the wording was that customer behavior had moved decisively to digital and the cost of running disc fulfillment for a shrinking base no longer worked. on the 31st of october 2017 the last red envelope cycle stopped. accounts kept access to their viewing history through prime video for another window. then the lovefilm domain redirected to amazon.co.uk and the brand was gone.

~ the long tail ~

the lovefilm brand had a quiet afterlife as a footnote in every uk piece written about prime video, the line that prime video had a disc-by-post ancestor under another name. the closure also marked the rough end of dvd-by-post as a uk category at all, the smaller competitors that had survived against lovefilm did not survive amazon shutting it down for the same demand reasons.

in the wider european story, lovefilm sat next to netflix-dvd as the second of the two big rental-by-post operations to close. netflix kept its us disc side running for years after that on a different curve. lovefilm was the one that did not get to taper, amazon closed it on a fixed date and moved on.

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