Companies are like animals that have evolved to fill a particular niche in the ecosystem. When things change it is very hard for that animal/company to adjust to the new environment.
Blockbuster was on every street corner. Despite being less convenient Netflix got their foot in the video rental door because there were no late fees. People despised late fees with a passion and Netflix solved that problem. Order a video, keep it as long as you like and pay a flat fee.
Blockbuster just could never break from its original model (I think, near the end, they did away with late fees but by then it was waaay too late).
Here’s another example: Know who invented digital photography? Kodak. But it did not fit with their model of selling film so they shelved it. Look where that got them.
Unfortunately the powers that be in a company would be fired in a heartbeat if they pushed out a new tech that destroyed the thing that made the company profitable. Instead they limp to their inevitable demise.
The Netflix streaming service and the Netflix DVD-by-mail services are very different. Many titles are available on physical DVD/BR but aren’t available for streaming.
How is this new streaming company going to acquire the rights to stream recent movies, and how much will it cost them? Would you pay for this service if it cost $100 a month? If it were possible to stream recent movies profitably, Netflix would be doing it.
Actually at the time 1.5 Mbs was enough as HDTV was just a glean in the super rich’s eye, everyone else sported standard definition, with compression would be deliverable at that rate or slower. At the worst some buffering.
This is why I kept my DVD subscription with Nextflix for so long. You can still get almost any movie you want on DVD from Netflix. But there are all kinds of licensing issues with offering streaming video. If you buy a physical DVD, you have paid all you ever need to to pay for it and you can rent it out, sell it, or give it away. The licensing deals for streaming content have expiration dates, and the availability is paltry. There are a handful of recent movies and classics available for streaming and a whole bunch of “B” movies. I don’t know why Netflix doesn’t license more titles. I am looking at Amazon and Verizon (my cable provider) as alternatives for recent on-demand films I actually want to watch.
Are you looking for these movies on Netflix’s streaming service or the DVD service ( which I think has a different name now)? I’m guessing that you’re looking on the streaming service and I suspect they would still be available through the DVD service. There’s a very big difference between streaming and DVD rental - if Netflix buys a DVD copy of Star Wars, it can be rented as long as the physical DVD will play. Even if only one person a year rents it, it doesn’t cost Netflix anything more than the storage space to keep it available. If instead of buying a DVD, they instead pay for a streaming license, that license will expire. When it expires, either the license will be renewed or it will be removed from the collection. If it’s not popular enough, it will be removed. The same thing happens with libraries and ebooks - I was on a wait list for an ebook and was notified last week that the license expired.
( I’m actually not sure you could find those movies at Blockbuster today if it still existed. I seem to recall Blockbuster having a fairly good selection of relatively new movies and not much of a selection of older movies)
Chester Carlson invented xerography (as it later became known) and went around to sell his patent to all the big business companies of the day such as IBM. They all passed. The small Haloid company made a deal with him, eventually becoming Xerox, and the rest is history.
Later, it was Xerox on the other end. They bought out a company making IBM 360 clones. It tanked. They got gun shy of computers. Meanwhile their research folk at Xerox PARC were inventing the future. The Xerox Alto desktop computer, Ethernet, laser printers, the “windows” interface, etc. Didn’t jump into the office computer business until it was too late.
It was said that if Xerox had marketed all this right away Apple wouldn’t exist.
Rochester, NY became a tech hub with Kodak and Xerox. Kept it alive while other cities like it were dying. Now it’s catching up.
So nowdays if I have the urge on a Friday night to see some random hit movie from the 70s or 80s there’s pretty much nowhere to go to?
It’s not available to stream. Video rental stores are gone. Redbox only carries the new stuff. Neflix by mail I have to wait days to get it.
I thought streaming was supposed to be this awesome thing that replaced Blockbuster?
Netflix still offers a DVD-by-mail service, and I would bet that all of those movies are available there.
I’ve subscribed to it off-and-on over the past three or four years. I’ll build up a list of movies I want to see, then subscribe to the DVD service. I’ll get a movie in, sometimes watch it, sometimes rip to an MP4 file, then send it back the next day. You can knock out eight movies in a month this way.
There’s Amazon Prime Video. It’s not cheap, though. Besides the Prime subscription fee, the rental rates are pretty high. I just looked up Terminator 2 as an example and it’s $6.99 to watch it.
Well, there’s a number of movies available to stream that just aren’t part of a subscription streaming package. Amazon, Vudu and other services offer streaming rentals.
Agreed with the earlier people who pointed at Blockbuster’s late fees. Blockbuster never really had a ton of goodwill with people so much as they were often the only game in town. For a lot of people, they were best known for draconian late fees and charges. When Netflix said “Want to watch a movie a day? Cool. Want to sit on that DVD for six weeks? Also cool” that was a real selling point.
The Kodak example of them shelving the first digital camera is true, but that was in the 1970’s, so it was quite premature then, since there were hardly any computers to make digital photography practical. And the quality was .01 megapixels, which is 10,000 pixels, which is 100x100 resolution - yeah, that belonged on the shelf. They came out with the DC-40 in 1995, which was ahead of quite a few of their competitors, and just about the right time for the market to start maturing. And in a partnership with Apple, it was also sold as the Apple Quicktake.
In fact, my first digital camera, which was one whole megapixel, was a Kodak and although it was kind of ugly, it had nice features compared to everything else available at that price point.
Although Kodak developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak’s photographic film business. In the 1990s, Kodak planned a decade-long journey to move to digital technology. CEO George M. C. Fisher reached out to Microsoft and other new consumer merchandisers. Apple’s pioneering QuickTake consumer digital cameras, introduced in 1994, had the Apple label but were produced by Kodak. The DC-20 and DC-25 launched in 1996. Overall, though, there was little implementation of the new digital strategy. Kodak’s core business faced no pressure from competing technologies, and as Kodak executives could not fathom a world without traditional film there was little incentive to deviate from that course. Consumers gradually switched to the digital offering from companies such as Sony. In 2001 film sales dropped, which was attributed by Kodak to the financial shocks caused by the September 11 attacks. Executives hoped that Kodak might be able to slow the shift to digital through aggressive marketing.
Under Daniel Carp, Fisher’s successor as CEO, Kodak made its move in the digital camera market, with its EasyShare family of digital cameras. Kodak spent tremendous resources studying customer behavior, finding out that women in particular loved taking digital photos but were frustrated in moving them to their computers. This key unmet consumer need became a major opportunity. Once Kodak got its product development machine started, it released a wide range of products which made it easy to share photos via PCs. One of their key innovations was a printer dock, where consumers could insert their cameras into this compact device, press a button, and watch their photos roll out. By 2005, Kodak ranked No. 1 in the U.S. in digital camera sales that surged 40% to $5.7 billion.
** Despite the high growth, Kodak failed to anticipate how fast digital cameras became commodities, with low profit margins, as more companies entered the market in the mid-2000s. In 2001 Kodak held the No. 2 spot in U.S. digital camera sales (behind Sony) but it lost $60 on every camera sold, while there was also a dispute between employees from its digital and film divisions. The film business, where Kodak enjoyed high profit margins, fell 18% in 2005. The combination of these two factors resulted in disappointing profits overall. Its digital cameras soon became undercut by Asian competitors that could produce their offerings more cheaply. Kodak had a 27% market-leading share in 1999, that dwindled to 15% by 2003. In 2007 Kodak was No. 4 in U.S. digital camera sales with a 9.6% share, and by 2010 it held 7% in seventh place behind Canon, Sony, Nikon and others, according to research firm IDC. Also an ever-smaller percentage of digital pictures were being taken on dedicated digital cameras, being gradually displaced in the late 2000s by cameras on cellphones, smartphones, and tablets.*
So it wasn’t that they never tried, it was just that the new market disrupted things enough that they lost their advantage.
Netflix only offers a limited selection of movies and content by design; they’re not trying to be the place you go for everything; just the one that is most convenient for some kind of entertainment. Most people aren’t all that particular about what the watch, and relatively few people really seek to watch classic movies, so offering a selection of a handful of recent films, some older, non-classic content that is cheaper to license, a lot of television programs, and then its own in-house or branded content that is only available on Netflix is a model that appeals to a wide enough range of the public that they have a broad subscriber base.
That being said, Netflix doesn’t have any kind of special sauce that anyone else can’t copy, and you can see new streaming content providers popping up all over the place, as well as traditional cable channels like FX and HBO providing streaming content through Amazon, Apple, et cetera, or having a separate streaming app. (CBS and ABC have tried this, too, with predictably awful results, because they don’t understand either the model or the technology.) Nor is it clear that Netflix is making a profit or will be able to maintain its market valuation as more competition arises.
If its classic and often obscure films you are looking for, try this.
Nothing is going to be an “awesome new thing” for everybody. It’s all going to depend on what you’re looking for. You have pretty much nowhere to go if you suddenly decide on Friday night that you want to watch some particular '80s hit. ( Although if you have cable, I bet you can find a selection there - God knows my husband does) But before streaming, I had nowhere to go if I wanted to watch a particular TV series in order. Sure, I could put the 45 discs of The West Wing on my Netflix queue - but I stopped putting series like that in my queue because too often , I would get the discs out of order ( the discs were in order in the list, Netflix shipped the first three available DVD’s- so if Disc One was in the top position on my list but it wasn’t available , they’d go down the list until there was a DVD available- which sometimes ended up being disc 2 or 3.)
I don’t know if they’re in your area, but there’s still a chain of video rental stores: Family Video. There’s a bunch in the suburbs of Chicago, so it isn’t just a rural niche of slow Internet/slow to adopt new tech.
The ‘by design’ was designed by the studios who basically castrated Netflix when they saw they had the winning design, and cut way back on what was available to Netflix and upped the price for content. This cutting off by the studios causes Netflix to go all in in producing their own content.
From what I’ve read (admittedly, not much), the studios raised their licensing fees for Netflix, Amazon, etc., because those companies became direct competitors in creating original content. I wonder if a new service that promised to stay away from original content would be able to strike a better deal.
Or – more likely – studios create their own streaming channels to undercut cable PPV offerings.
Either way, there’s an audience out there that Netlix’s streaming service is not serving. Someone will find a way.
Blockbuster’s DVD-by-mail service was so much better than Netflix’s while it was in business. Ironically, while brick-and-mortar Blockbuster stores were famous for having a lame selection (50+ copies of the latest lame movie, zero copies of 2001: A Space Odyssey), their DVD-by-mail service had every film. I never stumped it. And I watch weird movies all the time.
Garuda, an Indonesian low-budget kaiju film? No problem, Blockbuster sent it to your door in 24 hours. Netflix hadn’t even heard of it. (It wasn’t very good, BTW.)
