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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure there was a way forward for Blockbuster. Netflix and Redbox replaced it's core market with alternatives that were both better and more efficient by an order of magnitude.

A massive nationwide retail chain can't just pivot like a startup can. Blockbuster's retail footprint was massive. It had 9,000 stores. Worse, it had franchise stores which it owed a duty to.

Even if Blockbuster could have had a profitable online rental business, it would have been brought down by the retail failure. It would have gone bankrupt anyway.

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Did you read the article? It claims that Blockbuster had Netflix on the ropes with their "Blockbuster Total Access" thing, which was basically Netflix but better due to the physical stores and 10x more customers. Then they decided not to pay the CEO what he was due, he quit, the whole leadership team left, they brought in a new CEO who was terrible, and they abandoned the Total Access plan and were bankrupt within 2 years.

Actually I didn't see the next segment button, so thanks for letting me know.

But Total Access isn't the 800 lbs Gorilla that the author believes it to be. I actually subscribed to total access. It is certainly a cool feature, but I'm not sure it was very profitable. For essentially the same price as netflix, I could also get 2-3 instore rentals a month. All for what blockbuster used to charge for 3-4 rentals total.

But blockbuster could have survived Netflix. What it couldn't survive was netflix, redbox, and instant streams. Netflix took away the heavy movie fans. Redbox took aware the family movie night segment. Blockbuster couldn't survive on 1-1.50 a night, but Redbox could.

When Total Access came out I remember Blockbuster still had a death stench on it.

I think if you're a dinosaur in any space being devoured from the ankles by smallfry startups, the least you can do is build up some skunkworks projects to protect yourself somehow.

The dinosaurs more often than not try to protect their declining fortunes rather than cannibalise their sales, but often they could be doing both and doing it more effectively.

In this case there was a bit more going on, obviously.

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