(Oops, Garuda was Thai. Sorry Thailand.)
Oh yes this. This is what I came to mention. Netflix didn’t care about late fees, they just wouldn’t send you another movie until they got theirs back. Blockbuster held too tightly to the late fees model for too long and got bit by it. Along with that, Netflix’s customer service was way more accommodating in regards to their disks. My wife accidentally sent a Blockbuster DVD to Netflix and a Netflix DVD to Blockbuster. The Netflix agent was so cool about it when I talked to her: she said it happens a lot, she sent the next movie in our queue, tracked the errant DVD and got that back to us, and even gave us a bit of a refund. Blockbuster piled up late fees until we got the correct movie back to them.
Didn’t they get in some kind of trouble over their non-late fee late fees as well? I don’t remember.
In the end, Dish Network bought Blockbuster and they just tried to sell their networks in the Blockbuster stores. I went in there once and was cornered by this poor kid who had to take me through his whole spiel for Dish Networks while a manager watched from just enough of a distance away. He seemed apologetic when he couldn’t stop, but he kept going on with the sales pitch even though I assured him that we didn’t want Dish Network.
It’s not clear to me that there’s anything Blockbuster could have done. The problem is that a retail giant has a legacy cost structure that simply can’t compete with the logistics of a smaller Internet company.
Here’s a chart of Blockbuster vs Netflix revenues from 2004 to 2010. The most important datum in this chart is that Netflix’s revenue when Blockbuster goes out of business is only 1/3 of Blockbuster’s at the start of the chart.
Blockbuster had leases and franchisees and other contracts that stuck them with expensive retail space and employees. Netflix had a few mailrooms on cheap land, an efficient postal service, and envelope stuffers that could process 50 times what a Blockbuster retail employee could.
There was simply no way for them to compete.
All the unit scale economics that led Blockbuster to where it was (VHS tapes are big and can’t be cheaply shipped in envelopes, VHS tapes were expensive at first, leading to a longer rental payback, there was no efficient mechanized way to have renters pick movies from the catalog) changed drastically, and the business they built on the old economics could not compete.
That may have been his vision, which would have been far-sighted, but Netflix was founded in 1997, and at that time betting a company on the future of streaming would have been a risky proposition to say the least. Back then, the majority of consumer Internet access was still over dial-up. Few people had their own LAN at home (what would they need one for?), and those that did were faced with mostly first-generation wired Ethernet (second-generation 100 Mbps Ethernet had only been standardized two years previously, and most implementations still maxed out at a theoretical 10 Mbps and a practical speed just a fraction of that) or primitive, unreliable first-generation wireless that predated even wireless-B and was intolerably slow.
It might have been easy to believe that LAN technologies would soon become much faster to keep pace with faster computers with much larger storage capacities, but it was far from clear that broadband Internet would become ubiquitous and that, even if it did, the underlying infrastructure in every tier, in every neighborhood and across the world, would explode in bandwidth capacity as much and as rapidly as it did. It was just two years before Netflix was founded that the very first cable broadband pilot in North America was started, merely as a feasibility test. Undoubtedly there were still people around who saw ISDN with its 64 Kbps bearer channels as the future of consumer telecom.
And, indeed, in the years long after broadband rolled out, broadband ISPs were still trying to control their infrastructure costs by clamoring for ridiculously low industry-wide monthly bandwidth caps, and some had already imposed such limits on their own. In addition to all that, and as part of the same bandwidth concerns, some ISPs started a practice known as traffic shaping, where data packets associated with high-bandwidth traffic were intentionally throttled. It was not hard to believe that movie streaming could be targeted as such a bandwidth hog, and that, perversely, large broadband ISPs could see this as an opportunity to launch their own streaming services (as indeed some did) that would be exempt from such meddling. In fact some saw movie streaming services as a natural synergy with running broadband ISP services. They turned out to be wrong only because they were incompetent and Netflix did it better.
So it wasn’t entirely unreasonable for Blockbuster to be skeptical about streaming until it was too late. Not that Blockbuster wasn’t a sucky organization anyway, but there were good reasons to be skeptical. There’s also the fact that streaming would have been completely alien to their business model. They weren’t so much a movie distributor as they were a brick-and-mortar retailer. Streaming was also quite different from Netflix’s original mail distribution model, but at least they were already a centralized organization with a virtual presence, so they were at least appropriately structured for it.
I think you were looking in the wrong place. It’s $3.99 to rent, $6.99 to buy.
You can also rent streaming movies at Amazon without a Prime membership. I’ve done that a few times.
I do agree with your point that streaming rentals are a bit pricey, especially when compared to Redbox or a Netflix DVD subscription.
This is correct - a certain set of videos are available on Prime, either temporarily or permanently. Renting movies or whatnot is separate. If you have Prime, you just get some freebies from the start. and don’t need to pay for them. I’ve seen that most movies are $3.99, but newer ones tend to be $5.99 instead. Some companies seem to be a bit greedy about it though and charge unusually high prices, or apparently declined to list specific titles for rental for no reason.
Prime Video is a bit of an odd duck in that it has some shockingly hard-to-find stuff, but misses almsot all the current-run content you might expect on NetFlix.
Well, that’s annoying - I was trying to remove almost all of that pointless detail and point out that Amazon Prime, Redbox, and Netflix sort of took the basic idea of Blockbuster and diversified it. Blockbuster couldn’t do so because it had all the infrastructure to an existing market which declined too fast. Unfortunately, that can happen even to a well-managed business.
There’s a Blockbuster near my house. I could go by there and ask them.
No, Netflix never rented titles on VHS tape. The whole business model was based on the fact that a DVD could be mailed in an envelope. I think Reed Hastings even mailed a DVD to himself just to test this, and verify that the USPS wouldn’t break the disc in its machinery. And someone mentioned Blockbuster’s late fees. Another story is that Reed Hastings got the idea for Netflix after having to pay late fees at Blockbuster.
One more story. Early on, one of the things people hated about Blockbuster was that the stores never had enough copies of the popular new releases. So they came up with a plan where the studios would provide as many copies of the titles as Blockbuster needed for all of its stores. In exchange, the studio would get a cut of each rental.
KODI
Part of what has helped Family Video survive is that they own the land their stores are on. In fact, if you see a Family Video with a small strip mall, they probably own the mall as well and are leasing the spots to the other businesses.
They’ve also spun off some unlikely businesses under the Family Video umbrella; besides property management the Family Video parent company runs an exercise/gym chain, a chain of phone repair shops and a pizza chain.
And that’s why I signed up with Netflix in the first place. Streaming was barely on the radar when I joined in 2007.
Lots of people also use the library as their “video store”.
Family Video has a presence in my city, too, and IMHO their pizza business is what’s keeping them afloat. I understand that they also purchase strip malls and use the rental income from the other tenants to stay profitable.
It appears that a huge proportion of their video business is children’s titles.
In the mid 1980s, video stores were as common as vape shops are now.
One of the most popular video stores in my area had the restrooms in the porno section. :dubious:
You’d be surprised what’s on You Tube. Now that I can get it through my TiVo, I watch things this way all the time.
Huh, there are still six Blockbusters stores in Alaska.
Two in Oregon.
One in Texas.
Be kind. Rewind.
Speaking of missing streaming, a lot of content creators licensed their content to Netflix for next to nothing in the beginning because they didn’t see streaming as catching on. Once they realized how badly they screwed themselves, they stopped licensing and once streaming became reasonably simple to implement, did their own. Thus HBO streaming, and Disney streaming, and CBS streaming. Not more likely - it is happening.
And Netflix reaction is to create content themselves. So everything is fragmenting, and even TV critics for major newspapers can’t get all the services available.
Since this happens in nearly every expanding market, soon there will be a winnowing where services without enough content to get audiences will die and sell their content to the winners.
You wouldn’t be likely to get that movie from my Blockbuster store either. They had some, sure, but I spent many an hour in Blockbuster looking for something worth watching. I do that one every few months on Netflix DVD and build up a nice queue I don’t have to worry about. And for 30 entries maybe 4 are available on streaming.
That’s what did it for me. If you rented something from Blockbuster, you had to watch it right then and get it back on time. Netlfix, no problem. Which made them money since DVDs you sit on cost you more, but reduces your stress. Not charging postage for returns was brilliant. Mailboxes are going to be closer than video stores.
I think people don’t remember what a thing Blockbuster hatred was.
By the time Blockbuster had a DVD service their name was mud to me, anyhow.
Much preferred the little stores, which had a more interesting collection of tapes and that porn room in the back.
Kodi’s a/v quality usually really sucks. And is questionably legal. Might as well go full darkside and go for torrents.