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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

In the case of Blockbuster, it's reasonable to argue that they should have at least taken advantage of their brand (and relationships) to get into the DVD rental by mail business which would have, relatively speaking, not been a big stretch. Though phasing out retail would have been disruptive.

Of course, streaming was a whole different game. (As would be original content.) And it's not like Netflix is looking especially robust at the moment.

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Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix in the early 2000's for $50,000,000.

I bet it spent a while regretting not making that purchase, but then again, if they had Netflix may have become a passing fad and never branched out into the online streaming market.

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/netflix-blockbuster-meeting...

I had forgotten that. Yes. I suspect they’d have done the DVD by mail thing but then would have stagnated however many years later.

It blows my mind that Netflix is still mailing DVDs.

Not only that, but their DVD plan is far better then their streaming plan because it includes decent (not Netflix produced) movies.

I think it's highly unlikely Blockbuster was ever going to build and maintain a streaming service if they had purchased Netflix.

Hopefully this doesn't sound rude but that's what I just said

> Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix in the early 2000's for $50,000,000.

Ah, an example of the Butterfly Effect: then we'd have a billion references to FAABG on the web instead of FAANG.

I swear Blockbuster tried to do a DVD by mail thing. It just never got popular.

Yeah, they definitely did something like this. I recall you could return the DVDs to their stores to speed up the turnaround. And they eventually started a short price war with Netflix. But IIRC they had a lot of debt to begin with and combined with much higher overheard from all the stores it ended predictably.

Would you trust them to get DVDs by mail? At least my model of them was that they would do anything to scam me out of late fees.

They did, in summer 2007. They priced it for a dollar less than Netflix. They stuck with it almost 6 years, ending it when they left the retail business (except for the one franchise store remaining in Bend, Oregon).

https://www.reuters.com/article/industry-blockbuster-dc/bloc...

I think Blockbuster was an anti-brand at that point because of choices they made to navigate having national brick and mortar shops, making an unknown startup more trust worthy.

I'd used them begrudgingly in places that had no independent shops and the various inventory they didn't have were usually rumored to be that their management was christian conservatives, though I think it was more that they avoided a few arbitrary hotspots of potential conservative boycotts that would hurt them in other regions.

I remember that when a friend suggested them, I was quite pleased to be paying $1 more not to help them.

This is how I explain innovator’s dilemma to others

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