What I find most interesting about this story is that we talk about "subscribers" for Netflix, but the service those subscribers have subscribed to has changed

What I find most interesting about this story is that we talk about "subscribers" for Netflix, but the service those subscribers have subscribed to has changed (mailed DVDs, then streaming, then own content and maybe some other steps along the way that I'm not aware of). Blockbuster expanded what you could rent (movies then video games), they reduced restrictions on how you could rent (removing fees iirc), they let you buy adjacent items (card packs? candy? popcorn?), but for the most part, they still stayed within the traditional one-time-purchase, physical-good model. Perhaps some of this is just that Netflix survived long enough and into the right eras to make these transitions, but I conjecture that your most successful business model molds your management and therefore the space in which the management can imagine new pivots. The other direction is that the management has a certain mental flexibility and therefore the business has a certain flexibility... which is probably bidirectional and self-reinforcing when the ideas work. I don't see anything that could have stopped Blockbuster from becoming the Netflix we know today other than their management believing in the new business model(s). Perhaps only Blockbuster management would know. Have any of them told their story? Edit: Seems I'm just uninformed :) Blockbuster apparently had an online service that I didn't know about. Why did it fail? Too late?