Zip.ca

» see zip.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Zip.ca began shipping in February 2004 out of Ottawa, five years after Netflix started doing the same thing in California and six years before Netflix would bother crossing the border. Robert Hall founded it and chaired it. The model was the one everybody copied: a flat monthly fee against a queue of titles you wanted, with the discs arriving by post in a prepaid envelope and no due date on any of them.

It reached real scale for a Canadian service. Past 30,000 subscribers by February 2006 and past six million discs rented by that December, against a catalog of more than 82,000 titles, which was larger than any video store in the country could physically hold. It bought VHQonline.ca's web operation in 2005. Later it put rental kiosks in grocery stores, the same move Redbox was making in the US and roughly the same bet, that the disc had a few years left in it if you took the waiting out.

Rental by post never happened where I live. The category needs a postal service people will trust with a three-day round trip, and it needs a rental habit that survives the wait. Where I was, the path ran from the video shop on the corner straight to the download, with no mail step in between. So Zip.ca is a grave for a business model I have only ever read about. The prepaid envelope was a genuinely clever piece of design and I have never held one.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

Netflix launched in Canada in September 2010 as a streaming-only service, and that was the first real signal. Zip.ca's entire proposition was the physical disc, and so was its cost base, meaning warehouses and postage on every leg of every rental. Streaming carried none of that weight and did not care how many titles anyone watched.

The kiosk business was supposed to be the hedge and it hit the same wall from below. A box outside a grocery store renting discs by the night is not something you can defend once the movie is already sitting on a service the household is paying for anyway. The hedge and the main business were both bets on the disc.

~ the day it died ~

Zip filed for bankruptcy quietly in late April 2014 and kept shipping for another four months. On 17 August 2014 a notice went up on the site saying it was no longer sending discs to its members. The kiosks were pulled out of the stores afterward. That was the end of DVD-by-mail as a Canadian business, not just the end of one company running it.

Netflix's own DVD operation in the US outlived Zip.ca by nine years, which mostly says how much slack you get when the disc business is the profitable legacy arm of a streaming giant instead of the whole company. Zip.ca never had a second act to fund the first one.

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