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I had never heard this part about Blockbuster: > Blockbuster ... started with Blockbuster Online, an entity that was completely separate from Blockbuster’s ret

• glenstein 4y ago
  Right, it's a remarkable story. There's a wondery podcast series about it that was pretty interesting.
• mhzsh 4y ago
  And at the beginning, they tried to partner with Enron to do it. For some reason that part didn't pan out...
• aidenn0 4y ago
  The was a long series of articles posted on HN about a decade ago about how Blockbuster fell. TL;DR: Netflix didn't kill Blockbuster, Blockbuster killed itself with a revolving door of those in charge all trying the same simple, obvious and wrong solution to its problems.
• jonfw 4y ago
  How much influence did franchisees have on the corporate decision making? I can definitely see how, as a franchisee, I would rather ride the brick and mortar video rental business into the ground rather than try and transition the business, given that a retail franchise is a dead end either way
• rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  One thing that wasn't mentioned was that Netflix has a monstrously large catalogue at the time, and the user ratings and content recommendations made their offering extremely sticky. Switching to Blockbuster's competing service was a bit painful because you'd lose all your movie ratings, often stretching back years to the DVD-by-mail era. While Blockbuster could acquire brand new streaming subscribers by pricing their product similarly to Netflix, it was really tough for them to poach existing Netflix subscribers.
  • ben7799 4y ago
    Most of us weren't Netflix customers yet at the time this was going on. Whatever the case I was an active in-store Blockbuster customer at the time their stuff started to launch and I never had an inkling they were doing anything online. It was only a couple years later I remember trying the Netflix DVDs in the mail service. I don't remember actually subscribing till I moved into my current house in 2010. When we moved in there was no video rental store in town. 2004 was a long time ago! I remember 100% I was still going to the neighborhood Blockbuster in 2004.
    • gumby 4y ago
      > I was an active in-store Blockbuster customer at the time their stuff started to launch and I never had an inkling they were doing anything online. In a comment in this thread, jonfw mentioned that Blockbuster was a franchise business, which I hadn't known. That would explain why the physical shops wouldn't advertise an online alternative -- it would have been a direct competitor.
      • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
        This is explained the first time Blockbuster's streaming service is mentioned in the article, in the third paragraph, but perhaps could've been more explicit: > Blockbuster Online, an entity that was completely separate from Blockbuster’s retail business for reasons of both technology and culture: Blockbuster’s stores were not even connected to the Internet, and store managers and franchisees hated having an online service cannibalize their sales.
• prewett 4y ago
  I don't think Google belongs in that list of "oldline" companies... GE, Sears, and Boeing are all over 100 years old, and made/shipped actual physical products. Regardless of whether Google's internal incentives are backwards, they are certainly not a stalwart manufacturer. Google is in the business of selling ads, but they keep trying to branch out into selling products/services. Heh, I'd say the fact that they haven't really succeeded in that (aside from maybe Android) is empirical evidence that they are not an oldline company!
  • gumby 4y ago
    Google exhibits the structural weaknesses that crippled those other companies. The company may be only a quarter century old but it acts geriatric.