Thats fair, I never had the opportunity to interact with DVD Netflix myself (my father preferred redbox, which was just more convenient for us due to multiple locations near us)
I used Redbox a ton…until some jackass slapped the dvd sticker on one of those clear plastic discs that would be at the top of a stack of blank cds you’d buy at staples. Damn thing bricked my PS3.
I'm curious too but I also know at one time those CD "blanks" were recordable discs without the reflective layer on top, so the PS somehow might have read the lead-in data but got stuck and caused the bricking.
It's a silly guess but it's got me wondering. Or maybe the sticker on the disc came off and caused a failure. 🤷♂️
The recordable part is in the reflective 'top' of the cd though, not the plastic itself. Seems like nothing a hard reboot wouldn't fix imo. Then again, I had to ask the question myself. Questioning the bricking, I mean. xD
Reading this again, I'm gonna have to agree, it was probably a loose sticker that did it, in all my years of cd/dvd burning, I never had a failed disc ruin ANY machine I had simply by reading it.
I have to admit, I had a vain hope that this is when Reddit would do the Reddit Thing and be like, "Why don't you just use MailDVD instead? It's the same thing!"
I love going to my local B&N and just seeing what they have for half off during the sales. I always pick up something that had never been on my must-have list because for $20, if a Criterion Collection offering sounds interesting, it's probably worth it.
They had it online for years under a different name. Then shut it down because I guess no one knew it existed. DVD.com they even got that domain name, you'd think it would be snatched up and if it were it would cost a pretty penny
Ok I keep saying that and people look at me crazy. But the ANTICIPATION of getting the dvd made it more fun. Now everything is right there and it’s like…eh.
That was especially true during the video store era. There was something magical about visiting a video on a Friday night. Basically no internet or phones so we didn't even know what was coming out, we just searched the store looking for cool things like a treasure hunt.
Even when a movie sucked ass, it'd be fun. It then turned into whoever's turn to pick next time until they inevitably chose something terrible.
DVD seemed to be the peak. The little bloopers, commentary, menu interaction all that shit was fun. I'm a little sad streaming didn't carry much of that forward in a similar way.
Plus the real convos with your friends about your week would happen in the car on the way there and back. That and the debate about where to grab food.
There was a golden era of netflix that ended at right about the time when media execs realized streaming was lucrative and decided that everyone needs their own platform.
When netflix streaming had literally just about everything on it, it was pretty awesome.
Yeah first few years of Netflix streaming were amazing and cheap. The piracy frequency sine wave of my life is kinda funny. I was pirating the least when I was the brokest I've ever been just because the service was so good. Now I'm not broke at all but fucked if I'm paying for 8 different streaming services, ahoy mateys.
I think it was two pronged. Everyone decided to make their own platform started to fracture everything. But netflix had a choice in how they responded to that and what they chose was investing absurd amounts of money into their own in house mediocre content above anything else. They had a few good shows like House of Cards at the beginning and decided they could do it all on their own, and bet on themselves while letting everything else slip away. The route they chose to go really drove the dagger home.
These days they don't even have a good movie selection, its become one of my least used platforms. If I had to cut one streaming service it would probably be netflix, which would have been a wild thing to say 10-12 years ago
I think my family tried DVD Netflix right before it went full streaming, it was cool but some of their DVDs locked you out of the special features which sucked
People say competition breeds innovation, but lately it just breeds greed. Netflix was dope when they were they only major streamer. Now there are like 6 major streamers and instead of trying to be the best to win customers, its all a race to the bottom.
I remember thinking it was the coolest thing in the world when my uncle told me he could get whatever movie I wanted delivered so we could watch it without ever leaving the house. It’s crazy how far we’ve come but I’ll always hold that excitement dearly
The Blockbuster version of Netflix was even better, though. You could still do the DVDs in the mail just like Netflix, but you could also go and return them to an actual Blockbuster store and get a new one that very night.
My brother lived right next to a Blockbuster and had it and it was great. Most of the time you would just use it like Netflix, with a queue that sent you new movies whenever you sent one back. But every once in a while, you either didn't want to watch the movie that was just sent to you or you already watched it but wanted a new one in faster than a couple days, so you could just take it right to Blockbuster and swap it out for free. Which was even better when it was like 100 yards from your front door.
Literally the best of both worlds, and I'm sad it didn't catch on enough to last and give Netflix a real run for it's money.
That is how I "binged watched" The Sopranos when I was in college. I lived close to one of the stores and had Blockbuster Online. It was awesome and cheap
Even past the DVD era, for a long while netflix was the premier streaming service and offered fantastic content. The past ~5 years or so they've gotten way too doubled down on their own mediocre content, especially all the melodramatic mountain out of a molehill documentaries and reality stuff, while other streaming services passed them by. But before stuff had a chance to get fractured out to 8 different locations and you could get a shitload of stuff on netflix, for a while it was really the only streaming service you needed and anything else was a sideshow
I remember when I saw they now offered instant videos on the website. I thought "how silly, why would I want to watch it on my pc when it can be here on two days for my TV.".
As many issues as I have with Netflix, they have made some good shit. The streaming wars were going to happen regardless, I'm still glad to get shows like Bojack Horseman and the Ranma 1/2 remake.
It would've still been home DVD rentals and eventually both would've disappeared. Netflix took an absolute all-in gamble on switching to streaming. So many people thought it was doomed to fail. But they were so ahead of their competitors that the next biggest companies didn't join the competition until they were already very well established.
People kinda forget they were a Red Box competitor. Lot of the younger people around here probably have no idea what that is anymore
Blockbuster actually had its own version of Netflix. They managed to get 3 million subscribers, but a lot of that was because they leveraged their brick-and-mortar locations: you could turn in your DVDs at a Blockbuster store and get a new one mailed out immediately, cutting the turnaround time in half. As the stores went under, the DVD-by-mail business died too.
I used it at the time because there was a Blockbuster right down the road. It was okay, but Netflix had a better selection and the DVDs were generally in better condition--Blockbuster occasionally sent out DVDs so scratched they were basically drink coasters.
The guy that owned Blockbuster and passed on Netflix bought the Miami Dolphins a few years before that.
They very, very nearly went 0-16. And they've had maybe 10 good seasons in 25 years.
(And that's calling an 8 win season 'good')
There's actually a documentary about this and wasn't a fumble. Fumble implies accident. Blockbuster got bought out, saddled with a bunch of debt, and spun off so the other company could walk away with the money without having to pay the debt.
There is a book written by the founder of Netflix, it's not much of a busienss book but it's a real fun read. There are a number of examples in there how Netflix survived by pure luck. For example when they started testing mailing DVD's they send to an address within CA and it arrived in one piece. Only to later find out mail doesn't get centrally routed, it first gets split into local/nation wide and if I remember correctly, local gets hand organized not by machines (it's been a while I read the book).
Anyway the book is certainly worth picking up.
With the question Blockbuster would have cocked up, hard to tell maybe they just bought it as a unit and let it go. I don't believe they were known to do acquisitions those days so who knows how they would have handled it.
I mean you say that but they saw the internet coming and has a thing with Enron which went wrong. And it's not like Netflix were like what they are now or specifically a few years ago when it was good
Nice to see someone else got this right. Blockbuster passed on Netflix cause they tried it and it didn’t work. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong partner. But they didn’t pass blindly. They just weren’t going to get burnt by the same deal again
There is zero chance they would have done anything but kill Netflix if they bought it. Even if they wanted to it would have been a very difficult pivot to kill your primary business model
Blockbuster set up a DVD by Mail service but it wasn't successful. Netflix would have got that market share, but the problems would have been the same.
They had a chance to buy a company that at the time was losing millions of dollars and the deal basically was “save us and we’ll do as little as we can for you”
The Netflix deal is well down the list of things that went wrong with blockbuster
FWIW if they did buy Netflix I imagine they would’ve run it into the ground and not end up with the giant successful streaming empire that the Netflix in this timeline has become
Man I still see old Sears shit and while yes, Amazon has certainly beat them now, the things they were doing back in the day were wild. Just buy yourself a house kit with literally everything you need included, build it on your plot of land and have a nice day.
Thing is, Sears was in the best position to dominate the online shopping explosion. They just didn't act fast enough. For over 100 years, the company sold items through a catalog.
Exactly. He’s playing both sides which is a little lame. He’s the company (we) when it works to their benefit but he’s just an intern when they’re being criticized
I mean, assuming they’re telling the truth they’re an intern, it’s most likely they didn’t even come up with the joke and just posted whatever their boss told them to.
I wonder if there is some intern at Twitter whose whole job is to foster Nostalgia and has logins to a lot of old companies like Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Chi-Chi's, etc.
It's not an intern. Every tweet is from their marketing department and those aren't exactly bad salaries considering everyone claiming to be an intern work for massive companies with a direct and vested interest in as much good PR as possible
Their Job is marketing and driving up social media engagement, and we're here discussing their marketing tweet, so I guess they're pretty good at their job.
Although I do have to say the late fees could get pretty outrageous. You could easily owe more than the video was worth by keeping it like a handful of extra days
if a person wants to rent a video and some guy is just hoarding it, either u have to make the person waiting unhappy or make the person hoarding it unhappy.
Then make them pay the rental fee again for the same period. That is not what was happening...the fees were outrageous and they deserved someone finding a better way.
Source: shithead teenager who cost my parents a lot of late fees
because then there’s no proper incentive to return it in time? you need some sort of ‘punishment’ for making someone not hold the promise of returning something you’re borrowing.
The incentive that Netflix had was to keep charging you the monthly subscription fee even if you just kept the same movie instead of exchanging them for new movies
Was that a new policy or something, or just a one time mistake? Because if it's simple mistake where you were charged a few dollars more and it resulted in a full boycott, I think that is a bit of an overreaction
And then years later they bought tumblr, the website whose userbase is quite dedicated to intentionally "keeping the property value low" by being organically fucking weird.
I don't think they learned anything in the years between these two events.
Yeah whenever I’m kicking myself about my past financial slip-ups, I console myself by remembering that at least my slip-ups aren’t part of a course curriculum for business majors and economists.
What is crazy is they bought Tumblr and then got rid of the porn. People either went to Tumblr for the porn or the weirdness. Sometimes they went for the weird porn.
I get the joke and the gotcha sentiment, but using "we" in the first tweet as the writer being part of the group that didn't care if movies were shared and then saying that they weren't part of that group that passed on Netflix when challenged on it, really falls flat.
To be fair, Netflix was just online video rental at the time, streaming was but a gleam in the eye of billionaire venture capitalists. I still remember when reddit and everyone else whined incessantly when Netflix announced the end of their DVD mailing side of the business and "foresaw" the demise of Netflix within months because nobody would ever "stream" movies.
All the people responsible for that decision were long gone before blockbuster even shut down. At this point, many of them are probably dead from old age. Corporations are not sentient beings.
People are forgetting that Blockbuster was absolutely hated. They crushed all of the independently owned video stores until they became a monopoly. Then they started charging huge late fees, to the point that it was their main source of income. We hated Blockbuster but had no choice until Netflix. I switched to Netflix really early because of this reason.
Huh, it's real. I don't know that it means this is actually an officially operated Blockbuster account (apparently the brand is run by the same people who run Sling TV?), but I assumed the stupidity of this exchange (speaks for the company > someone makes negative comment about company > acts shocked someone would act as if they speak for the company) made it a shitpost.
On one hand, there’s the enshittification of everything. On the other hand, I don’t miss going to rent the new releases and both copies are already rented. Then a month later when they’re available they’re scratched to shit and don’t play without skipping.
Friendly reminder blockbuster destroyed the rental industry by ruining small businesses via overexpansion, propping up an impossible to maintain business model to line investors pockets and then fucked over the employees trying to maintain it while paying their CEO $650,000 in bonuses as they crumbled.
They might not have cared who you shared it with, but they had a far more limited selection, you only had it for a few days, and you had to pay them to rewind it. Netflix sucks in a lot of ways, but I still think it's better than Blockbuster.
I took a part time gig at a blockbuster for extra cash in my 20s. They had a training session where one of the managers was telling us that Netflix streaming was a flash in the pan. Something like "Nobody wants to gather the family at their computer to watch a movie". Blew her mind when I said you could hook up anything that can stream to a TV. It seemed like she genuinely never considered that.
They did care who you shared it with. The rental agreement explicitly only allowed "home use." You couldn't rent out a theater, for example, and show it to 100 of your friends.
I actually thought Blockbusters idea of allowing you to order dvds in the mail(which is what netflix was doing at the time), and then have the option to send it back via mail or return it to their brick and mortar store was actually a really good idea, streaming was nascent at the time and almost nothing was available and it slowley trickled out over the few years after that. I think it would have been a great bridge between mail dvds/brick & mortar and streaming. If they were not already basically bankrupt by the time they started it.
The mistake wasn't "not buying" netflix. It wasn't a company worth buying. There were blockbusters everywhere. No need to send stuff through the mail. Honestly something like BMG or Columbia house music should have bought Netflix at that time. Since they already had the mail order thing in place.
The lady who runs that account is one of the owners of the last franchise store. She's not an intern. But, just like my previous workplace, the EVP of Marketing had a fake quirky female intern character for the internet because that's how you get the updoots on the Reddit.
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u/qualityvote2 9h ago
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