I worked for AOL in 1994-1995. They were always promising streaming vide was around the corner but it wasn’t, except for postage-stamp-sized 10fps experiments. I assumed it would never happen. Imagine my surprise when years later I discovered YouTube. I knew then the jig was up for a lot of companies, including video stores; the dominoes are continuing to fall. However I am not smart or active enough to have profited off this insight.
By the way, for those seeking streaming movies and TV shows, the app JustWatch is useful though not the final word on where you can find stuff. And for real classics, the Criterion Collection has moved around but is now available through a service called Filmstruck.
Not just “ready to go”, they sold them pretty early on. I had (still have, somewhere) a Kodak digital camera, which I won in a competition in about 2000.
Sears’ shift from a mail-order business to a network of physical stores in the early 20th century is one of the great examples of a corporation completely retooling its business model successfully. It just couldn’t reverse the process to compete with Amazon.
One of the famous business school gurus has a theory about “core competencies” and how companies succeed when they stick to those things they’re good at. So, for example, Honda makes great cars, motorcycles, lawnmowers, etc. because their core competency is actually in making IC engines. So they’d be foolish to get into, say, making toaster ovens.
Kodak’s core competency was in chemicals and film. (A Kodak spinoff called Eastman Chemical has 15,000 employees and $9.6 billion in revenues.) So when the market moved to digital cameras, the companies with consumer electronics expertise did better.
How did streaming to the TV first come about? Was it with Roku boxes? That’s how I first watched streaming Netflix. What enticed manufactures to make standalone devices which could stream to the TV back when there wasn’t a lot of streaming demand?
Streaming on TV first came from running computer output to TV, which was easy with HDMI TVs and wasn’t that uncommon with older interfaces. Then people started adding streaming apps to other devices that were already connected, like the PS3 which came out in 2006 (two years before Roku).
They started as audio only. Remember the early days of internet radio? You could get devices that would stream music to your television. Wikipedia says that was way back in 2000.
Netflix launched in 1997 but didn’t begin streaming until 2007, so digital media players had been around for a long time by that point.
As someone who was there, here is my rememberance.
At first, netflix streaming sucked (about 10 years ago). It was all foreign films and B movies and they were horrible. The real benefit of Netflix was that you could rent DVDs by mail. I forget when netflix stream became good enough to actually be worth it on its own, maybe 2010?
Blockbuster did try to combat this issue by creating their own DVD by mail service, which had the added benefit of instead of mailing the DVDs back, you just took them into blockbuster and exchanged them for new movies.
So I’d get 3 DVDs via mail from blockbuster, then after watching them I’d exchange them at the blockbuster for 3 physical DVDs. Then return those, then order 3 more by mail.
It was actually a pretty nice system. I think this happened around ~2007 when this system was in place.
But the online streaming catalogs kept getting better, and blockbuster never really took online streaming seriously and here we are.
FWIW, Family Video is still doing great. There are tons of those still around. Redbox is also common. So the physical video store isn’t gone, because Family Video and Redbox are easy to find where I’m at. There are serious limitations to streaming. A lot of movies aren’t available, and it takes a while before new releases are affordable ($5 to stream a new movie vs $2 at redbox).
Movie Gallery, Blockbuster and all the independent video stores are gone. But Family video and Redbox still exist.
Actually, I think Tivo is how I first started streaming to the TV. I remember renting movies from Amazon. Back then, the movies were not streamed as you watched them. The whole movie was downloaded to the Tivo, and then you would watch from there. That was beneficial back when most internet was slower than today, but you might have to wait a while for enough of the movie to be downloaded before you could start watching.
Yeah, my old TV had a VGA port on it and an audio-in jack. So even without an HDMI connection, you could output video & sound to it and watch stuff from the couch on the “big screen” (well, bigger than my monitor at least). Of course, this required you to have a computer near the TV but early adoption isn’t always elegant.
I suspect a number of techie-type movie fans were already connecting their computers to televisions and watching catalogs of downloaded/ripped movies so it was no great shakes to try streaming the same way.
Starz had streaming rights and no streaming service, so it made a few tens of millions off them.
3 years later, Netflix streaming subscribers were up by a factor of 2.5, and Starz turned down (estimated) 10x as much money to extend the agreement. So, they seriously underpriced it originally. Widely considered a major strategic blunder by Starz
Since this thread has turned into mostly anecdotes, I’ll share mine. My first job was working at a small local video rental place, I worked there with another guy from high school. We both had a pretty decent knowledge of movies, far more than you’d expect from the average 18 year old. However, the manager decided that the best way to increase sales was to fire all the male employees and replace them with attractive women that couldn’t get hired at Hooters. I was so happy when that placed closed.
I’m annoyed by Netflix’s turn towards streaming and ‘original content.’ I don’t have time to take on more TV series, there’s plenty of times I just want to watch a movie for 90 minutes or so. I don’t want to binge watch something with a weekend long time commitment. I still keep my subscription, but I seriously consider suspending it during summer when the weather is nice and I want to be outside.
I use Redbox for new releases, there’s one across the street and I’d rather see a new release in blu ray quality. They’re always sending me promo codes, and I’m quite sure I couldn’t rent from Blockbuster for one US dollar, even in the 1990s.
Amazon streaming works for most films, but I do miss the days of the Netflix DVD queue. Netflix hurt themselves by being so focused on throttling, and the elimination of Saturday service. Too bad, that could be a small, but profitable niche for them as I’d still rather watch a DVD than a streaming film.
Netflix still has a DVD queue. Few of the old movies I want to watch are on streaming, and I find that having the envelope there encourages me to spend the time to watch the movie.
I don’t think Redbox or any streaming has the original 1922 Lost World - which is fantastic, by the way.
Also Netflix hit upon something at exactly the right time …
The sudden nostalgia for TV shows …a lot of the TV shows that were on 24/7 weren’t on anymore and people missed them (I admit to binging the incredible hulk knight rider airwolf and the a team) Columbia house started it but huge DVD/vcr sets turned people off and like described above even getting them through the DVD service was a crapshoot
Then Netflix picked them up cheap and started the whole seasons/series of TV shows which is what 75-90 % of people watch Netflix for
I think if they hadn’t hit upon that streaming would still be a niche thing
For the first few years, You Tube videos were limited to 10 minutes at a time, so anything longer than that had to be split up. Now, there’s no time limit so anything goes as long as there aren’t copyright issues.
And I still have my Netflix queue. It’s no longer capped at 500.
It was either Hollywood video or Blockbuster who had a few select 99 cent rentals and they called it their “Classic Cinema Collection” where for a two day rental you could watch stuff like Gone With The Wind or The Sound of Music on VHS. Somebody must have been subsidizing them for that to happen, wouldn’t be surprised if some studio gave it to them in bulk in exchange for putting a bunch of ads before the video started
Why do you think it was necessary for those rentals be subsidized? This is stuff that probably few people were renting (as opposed to the new releases) and the stuff was cheap.