Change is hard. Blockbuster’s entire structure was built around thousands of retail stores. Becoming Netflix just wasn’t in the cards. It would be easier to blow up the company and start from scratch.
No more late fees! Just, y’know, a fee that we charge if you’re, uh, late.
Here’s a funny thing. We rented movies plenty back in the day. But now I and my husband have a strong aversion to renting or buying individual movies digitally. Even though the price is the same or less than a Blockbuster rental all those years ago. Somehow, in this age of streaming and Netflix and subscriptions, renting a single movie feels like getting ripped off. It’s really weird.
We are the same way. We have even tried to break our ‘don’t rent’ habit, but when we rent a movie it ends up available for free on one of our streaming services a couple months later. The end result is we are even more hesitant to rent a movie now.
As I remember it, it wasn’t a fee at all, they just sold you the video. Under their old system you could very easily accrue more in late fees than the video was worth if you were like a week late returning it. And since getting approved as a renter at a video store used to feel like a fairly convoluted process, if you didn’t settle up with them your rental options would be limited. Most smaller towns were lucky to have a Blockbuster + one competitor, some had no competitors.
Yes, it’s weird! I was reflecting on this the other day. A movie I wanted to watch disappeared from Netflix, so I went looking for it elsewhere. It’s readily available, but I’ll have to fork over $3.99 to watch it. My immediate reaction was, “Ugh, no way!” Then I realized that 15 years ago, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying Blockbuster $3.99 to rent that movie. However, that realization didn’t change my aversion to digital rentals at all. I can’t figure out why I feel this way.
I do occasionally rent DVDs from a Redbox that is a short walk from my home. But somehow that’s different, and it’s only $1.75.
That’s a good point, in the 80s VHS tapes were priced to rent with tapes costing $80+ dollars which most people were unwilling to pay. Heck, we even have a thread about it here! The first VHS movie I can remember being sold pretty hard directly to the public was Top Gun around 1987. The next movie I can remember is Batman (YouTube) from 1989. The commercial I linked to doesn’t actually give a retail price but the narrator tells us it’s “specially priced.”
I suspect whatever agreement studios had regarding the pricing of new movies on VHS simply did not apply to DVDs. By the time DVDs were released, Hollywood was more than fine with releasing moves for the home market at reasonable prices.
Wikipedia says that videotapes of Top Gun was “priced as low as $26.95”. And I agree that it was the first big film priced for “sell through”, meaning for sale directly to consumers rather than to video stores.
I feel the same way. Not sure why. Maybe its because piracy means you can see it for free, maybe its because if you shop around you can probably buy a DVD of the movie for $5, maybe its feeling like since I’m already paying for streaming services I should be able to watch it. I’m not sure but I feel the same way.
Its hard for me to pay $3 for a digital rental despite the fact that I had no issue paying that to rent a physical DVD a decade ago.
For me, I think it’s because I kind of resent paying for streaming services and then having to pay extra to digitally rent something. If I can hold out long enough I can just wait for the movie to come out on a streaming service. Hopefully one I subscribe to.
I think people are overlooking the impact of internet piracy here. Even 20 years ago, people were downloading entire movies off torrent sites. Blockbuster couldn’t compete with that. Why go outside and pay money when you can get the same thing at home for free?
Netflix and its streaming ilk just slapped a legal veneer on something people were doing anyway.
I don’t think that was a huge issue 20 years ago. Most people didn’t have the internet speed to download whole movies, and even fewer were able to hook their CRT to their computer to watch them. You could download a shitty version of a TV show or something to watch at your desk, but it wasn’t really the same thing as watching a movie on your TV.
Maybe my memory is messed up, but that’s how I remember the timeline, at least.
I agree with MandaJo that downloading movies was not really that feasible 20 years ago. Yes, bit-torrent existed, but you had to have a fast enough connection which was not cheap, and enough hard drive space, which also was not that cheap. So, if you wanted a movie, it would take days to download it, and sometimes the only place to do it efficiently was at work, if they allowed that kind of thing.
Also, I think the piracy angle has always been overstated. The Movie industry always says that it loses X amount of dollars to piracy, but that is assuming that the people doing the downloading would have paid to watch the movie, which is not necessarily true. Often people only watch the movie because it is free, so the movie industry would have not received their money anyway.
I don’t think piracy really was a factor in why blockbuster failed. As pointed above, it really was about them not being nimble, or innovative. They could have converted the stores to be more of a gathering place, with knowledgeable staff to give recommendations, something that is difficult even these days unless your views happen to match with a particular movie critic.
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I remember in the late 90s, you’d spend half an hour to download a one minute clip of a TV show. I don’t think piracy, at least not video piracy, was an issue back then. I don’t recall exactly when internet speeds were fast enough for video piracy but I remember it wasn’t too common in the aughts, at least not to my memory. internet speeds and hard drive storage were much less back then.
music piracy was huge back then however.
I don’t think the impact of piracy is particularly relevant here. Netflix managed to make money renting DVDs at the same time that Blockbuster couldn’t, and they grew the market. Maybe the market would have grown slightly faster if not for internet piracy, but piracy is not a significant factor in why Blockbuster failed.
Blockbuster died because retail stores with expensive rent clerked by people had a much worse cost structure than a website backed by a distribution warehouse and the USPS.
Netflix beat Blockbuster with physical DVD rentals, not streaming. Netflix’s streaming revenues were a drop in the bucket when Blockbuster cratered into the ground.
oh in the 00s you could get movies off the internet through mirc chat rooms that used file servers but it took 20 hours and 4 cds and you had to not mind the hidden camera approach and indonesian subtitles
Until the swedish kid figured out how to crack dvd’s anyways …
funny thing is i rerely rented movies from blockbuster or the other video store i went to … id rent the video games but gamestop selling used games dirt cheap pretty much ended that … just like things like the MS game pass will kill gamefly eventually …
VHS movies were expensive for a long time because there was no way to mass produce the tapes. Every tape recorded had to be put through a VCR that was being fed the movie and recorded at-speed. Even if you can re-use the equipment endlessly, there’s electricity and rent for the space used to house all of that, plus the blank tape, which is significantly more expensive than a disc. Optical disks are super-cheap to produce, as they can be stamped much like vinyl. The price of the individual disks is mostly the license for the content, not the physical media and the labor of transferring of the data as it was on a VHS tape. I assume eventually there were dedicated large-volume machines that could write data to tapes extremely quickly that enabled mass-rollout of big movies on VHS, but regardless, it has always been much faster just to stamp a disk.
I had enough Blockbuster late fees to make me hate them forever. I get why late fees existed but they were also basically beating-up on their own customers. As soon as an alternative presented itself those people were more that happy to bolt. At least, I sure was. I was thrilled to never go to Blockbuster again. Having your customers despise you can’t be a good model for running a business.
I hated paying late fees as much as anyone, but what was the issue with it? If you didn’t return it the next day, they couldn’t rent it out to someone else and make money. You might as well be upset that Holiday Inn charged you for two nights instead of one when you actually stayed two nights. Nobody would complain if you overstayed your hotel by a night and got charged, so why the hatred of being charged for keeping your movie an extra day?
If I remember correctly, BB said you could keep the movie for 2 nights, but the 2nd night was just until midnight or something. That confused a lot of people. Many people thought it was 48 hours. If they rented the movie at 3pm Monday, then they thought they could return it by 3pm on Wednesday. But really it had to be back by midnight on Tuesday (or maybe by opening on Wed morning). That misunderstanding meant a lot of people ended up with unexpected late fees. And the corporate retail drones were not allowed to make any exceptions or forgive fees for that misunderstanding. I think eventually they made the rentals be 48 hours, but by then many people already hated them for the late fees.