Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay afloat

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30076153/

Netflix FTW!

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Ha ha ha! I still owe them $4 in late fees!

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Blockbuster blew it a few years back. They had a chance to buy a pattent on a DVD that came sealed and after it would open, would only last a week and then become unuseable. Instead of buying this and selling like that, they continued with their late fees and returns and all that crap.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Bail 'em out!

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Netflix can blow me. I demand instant gratification.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Netflix watch instantly. phtttdddtp

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

With the falling prices of commercial space, I'm surprised Blockbuster is having such a hard time.

Scratch that, no I'm not. But they've really got to fix their business model. Netflix has a decided selection and interface advantage over Blockbuster, but their delivery time is still shit, except with Roku, but that's of limited appeal and selection. There's got to be a way to capitalize on that.

If I was running Blockbuster, I'd negotiate with the studios for their entire catalogues, and the right to run a DVD duplicator or 5, a la Red Box, but with much better selection. Let people order online so that by the time they drive down to the store, whatever DVDs they want are burned and ready to go - that fixes the interface and selection problems, and they maintain their delivery speed advantage. You could shrink the stores drastically or maybe keep a selection of new releases on the wall, and keep doing video game rentals on the shelves, but put all library titles in the machines (or keep them encrypted on a central (per store) mutli-terabyte RAID array. Have 5-20 per store (don't want wasted capacity, but don't want lines either), and offer the studios a deposit for each copy rented to be mostly-refunded when the customer returns it. Offer the studio the deposit every time a particular disc is rented until the studio has collected enough fractions of the deposit to equal the usual rental disc cost, then treat it like any other rental disc.

I think even if they kept their current pricing structure, this would save them. If they figured out a way to make the pricing structure better, that would help a lot too. Netflix may be $20/month for "unlimited" movies, two at a time, but it's not actually unlimited. There's a definite limit: let's say you buy a subscription on January 1. You can't get the first two movies until January 2. Watch them, send them back on the 3rd. Get the next two on the 5th. So you get movies on the 2nd, 5th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th, 20th, 23rd, 26th, 29th. Except that there's Sunday to contend with. Assume January 1 is a Monday (and not a mail holiday). Movies come Tuesday, Friday, Tuesday (because they didn't receive the movies you sent Saturday until Monday), Friday.... Which means you only get movies 9 times during the month, not ten. Staggering the returns, you get one movie on the Tuesday/Friday cycle, and another on a Wednesday/Saturday cycle. Which gets you an equal number of movies in months with 31 days, and one less on months with 30 days (although there will be cases where the month is 31 days long, but ends on a Monday, in which case you get only 17 movies for the month, but you would have gotten only 16 sending them in at the same time anyway). Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that people don't usually watch movies or TV that fast consistently, and if you do, Netflix will actually slow down your shipments on the theory that you're ripping the DVDs and watching them later. The expected maximum mean is roughly 17/month then, and most likely, the real mean is likely around 10-12/month, maybe less. With the 3 DVD at a time plan, the real mean goes up, but probably not by 33%, which means a higher cost/rental.

If Blockbuster can get prices down do those levels - $1.17-$2.00/rental, that would keep them afloat. How they do that is up to them.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

TPB rules.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Target and Walmart "sold" those DVDs (the original Divx - the codec name was a mockery of it) for a while, for something comparable to a rental price. They flopped miserably. If Blockbuster had gone with that system (buying the patent wouldn't have mattered since they don't have a DVD press), they would have failed years ago.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Fuck Blockbuster.

I went round and round and round with them over some late fees several years back, to the point where I wound up shredding my blockbuster cards and never using them again. Talk about pissing off your customer base and driving yourself out of business!

Blockbuster is a classic example of a company that failed to adjust in a timely manner to new/better business models and emerging technologies. The market appears to have spoken, and...

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Around here there is a Blockbuster and some Movie Gallery stores. And they are fine if all you want is the newest release of the latest pablum from Hollywood. But if you want any genre stuff, it's netflix all the way.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

If you demand instant gratification, then actually Netflix is for you. You can watch a LOT of movies instantly on your PC without leaving home or even going to the mailbox.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

The only videos I'll watch on my computer are porn clips and Star Trek fan films. Everything else runs through my DVD player, TV, and surround sound receiver. I may one day merge the two setups (wireless keyboard, big TV as monitor, high dollar video and sound cards), but not until I can drop enough money on parts to acheive the same sound and video quality.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

How about dropping $99? 480P or 720P HDMI or component, 480I composite, 2.0 dolby surround via spdif toslink. I've had two since May. They're pretty good.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

When I was shopping for my first DVD player in the late 90s, one of the salesmen at Circuit City tried to sell me on DIVX.

Stupid fucking idea.



As for Blockbuster, this doesn't affect me.

I haven't rented a movie from them since I bought my first DVD player. DVD prices have always been affordable enough that, if I think I'm going to watch a movie more than once, I just buy it. My "rentals" have been done with pay-per-view for more than ten years now.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Blockbuster (and all rental stores) are going out of business because DVDs are so cheap and their rental fees are so high that there's no incentive to rent anymore.

Couple this with the frustration of not finding the movie you want, late fees, etc. and you get see why they're dying out.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

OK... so why not be like me and watch netflix on your main hd tv, in hd?

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

They had a good run. over 20 years of fucking people hard. I remember one guy who lost a tape and had to pay $89 for it to keep it off his credit. That kind of shit is what killed them.
Hell, why don't they just go to selling only and forget the rental crap. They buy in enough bulk that they could make a killing.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

How i feel about Blockbuster going under.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

I had forgotten how big BB was in England, I used to rent from them in Mildenhall Village.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Please God, make it stop.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Ted would have hated this thread.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Fuck 'em.

The Movie Gallery here in town used to charge $7.00 to rent a new a release. Seven fucking dollars.

Exactly one block over, a locally owned, non-chain related video store, charged $2 per new release rental on Monday, and $4 every other time.

Plus, for older movies, you can rent 5 of them for $5, for 5 days.

Either way, less and less people are renting movies, because with the internet today, you can download any movie you want in 5-10min.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

I don't have an "HD" TV. It's just a CRT TV that's bigger than my computer monitor.

I'm not waiting for shit in the mail, and I'm not dealing with some kind of fucking dish subscription service. For the moment, I only have basic cable. If I want to watch a movie, I'll drive 5 minutes to rent a DVD. This works just fine for me, but then I'm not some kind of lazy fucking incompetent for whom returning a movie on time is a monumental undertaking.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Yeah. First time someone explained the DIVX idea to me, I was like "what are you, high? No-one's gonna go for that."

Turns out I was right.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

I say good riddance. I despise Blockbuster.
Netflix is far superior anyway, even with their issues.

J.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

As someone who has worked for them for the 2 1/2 years.

3things have hurt the company in the most IMO.


When I started working there all our movies were $4.76, then they went up to $4.87 and the last jump made new releases (anything thats been out for less than a year) $5.29 and older movies were brought down to $4.23. Game rentals were all $8.47, now the older systems are still the same or $2/10.60 and the PS3, X360 and Wii games are $9.53 or $2/15.90. Also, next time you go in a BB, take a look at candy prices

People still complain about the $1.25 restokcing fee. For anyone who hasnt been in a BB in the last few years the new late policy is:

you have a 7-day grace period with all your rentals, after that it charges the creditcard on the cost of the movie (previously viewed price for older movies). You have 30-days to return the movie and everything but $1.25 is refunded, if the CC on the account is expired or for some other reason doesn't go through the person is charged next time they are in.

^This policy seems to get us more crap then anything else, I suppose I can see why but it could be worse, they could be doing with the Hollywood up the street that chargest latefees. Honestly I dont know what to tell them on this one. A return to latefees may make the company more money in the very short term, but it would hurt in the long term. On the other hand the $1.25 leaves people made, but if you didn't something people wouldn't return movies and they are out of business anyways.


The other thing that got BB in trouble is their changes to the online program. They took away the free monthly cupons and they made the unlimited instore exchanges more expensive. Now even on top of my free rentals, I still use Blockbuster Online and I love it, but then I watch a ton of movies. I'm on the 3 at a time, unlimited exchanges in store, which with tax comes out to $37.09, but it still works out, I got 19 movies through them last month and then with the instore exchanges thaqt comes to 38 movies. (yes, I watch wayyy to many movies, but in my defense, I got 3 of those movies for someone else) but anyways, unless your a major movie watcher I can see where its not worth it. (I think .97 cents a movie is).

I believe that if they went back to the old policy with the online policy, it'd do alot to make the company do better against Netflix.



There's been rumors of changes coming, we've heard some rumors of what they might be but we've got no idea when they will come into effect, if you live in Flordia, I've heard those stores down there are the company's test dummies. Also, apparently, the higher ups are arguing on what to do with prices and thats holding up the whole show. Not sure if I can post what we've been told:-S



But anyways, I know I dont post much, but theres my 2 cents on what Blockbuster could do, or at least what most people that I deal with seem to think.

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

Okay, someone explain to me why DIVX didn't work?

Aren't most movies on the internet ripped in a DIVX avi format?

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

The Old DIVX DVD

DivX Codec

Re: Circling the Drain: Blockbuster has "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay aflo

With internet speeds doubling every year with the same amount of money, I think in five to seven years time even Netflix might go under. Setting up PC's with big screen TV's are getting cheaper by the minute, you don't even need too much technical expertise to hook each other up.