One last red envelope for the road.
There was a point in the late 2000s when it seemed like every mailbox was stuffed with red envelopes. Netflix shipped a billion DVDs by mail between 2007 and 2009 alone, with its loyal fansby returning 1.6 million discs every single day. Almost every film ever made, available via next-day delivery, with no late fees: that formula didn’t just drive Blockbuster into bankruptcy but, for a moment in time, completely redefined how movies were watched.
Manual labor was a big part of Netflix’s early days. Employees hand-stuffed 137 envelopes on launch day in April of 1998, and they continued to fulfill every order by hand even after the company began opening fulfillment hubs across the country in 2002. But once Netflix grew to millions of subscribers, it quickly became clear that this model wasn’t tenable.
Bronway custom-designed a massive disc robot called the “automated rental return machine,” or ARRM 3660. The ARRM, as Netflix employees simply called it, was an assembly-line-sized machine consisting of 6,500 parts total.
Netflix’s automated rental return machine did more than keep an eye on the discs’ barcodes: part of the machine was a high-precision scanner designed to detect any physical imperfections. The technology was developed by Dr. Schenk, a German company specializing in quality control for CD and DVD manufacturers, and Netflix had commissioned the company to customize its technology so that it would work even with used discs.
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