Netflix May Already Be Killing Blockbuster?

Mattintosh writes "A blogger at C|Net takes a moment to consider the impact Netflix has had on Blockbuster. Some notable highlights include heavy losses ($35 million), job cuts ($45 million worth), and store closings: 'Much like the print media and retail stores refusing to change, Blockbuster has been a victim on an online company finding new and inventive ways of bringing a product to a customer. And due to its size and outdated corporate culture, there really is no salvation for Blockbuster at this point. Try as it might, the future of Blockbuster is bleak, at best. Sure, the company still enjoys revenue that climb into the billions of dollars, but with an ever-increasing net loss and a public refusal to focus on Total Access--the area where Netflix continues to dominate--what is the impetus for us to jump on the Blockbuster bandwagon?'"

Comments

Blockbuster lost my business

[philmack]

Blockbuster lost me (and several of my friends' accounts) to netflix when they recently did away with their in store exchanges unless you opted to pay like 30% more for the exact same service. I have to imagine that a lot of people did the same.

Re:My only problem with neflix

[pappy97]

cafedvd.com offers the service you want, you rent by mail per DVD you actually watch, no subscription. Check it out. They call it "a la carte" renting.

It would not be hard to beat netflix on-line...

[(H)elix1]

I'm a netflix cusomter - 4 CD's in three queues (child, bride, me). As a perk, they also let you have an hour/usd of streaming content each month. For me, that works out to ~24 hours a month. Great, right? Well, it only works in the States, so any gigs in Canada are right out.

The chink in the armor is the selection. While they have a massive collection of DVDs, the streaming selection is really poor. I would not pay extra for it as it stands. At home, It looks about the same as a DVD on a high bandwidth connection - here for example, is a movie getting piped to a TV via my laptop. Bandwidth in hotels works better than I expected, and it is good enough for watching on a computer. I hear Blockbuster might have better selection... they should embrace the streaming!

Re:Thank Big Tel/Cable

[frdmfghtr]

Can someone please explain to me why you are willing to pay astronomical monthly fees for Netflix on a recurring basis and you might not even get your #1 choices? I just don't understand how the business model survives.

Sure...because for $9/month (astronomical?? I think not), I can get a movie (have always been able to get my #1 picks so far) in my mailbox for an unlimited amount of time, drop it in the mail when I'm done, and four days later have another one in my mailbox. I don't have to stop anywhere, I can browse online, AND if I come across a movie I want to watch and it's available to stream, I can watch it instantly (assuming I have Windows; my Mac is thus far not supported). Nine hours (I think) of streaming per month is included in that $9 monthly fee.

On top of that, when my monthly fee dropped from $9.99 to $8.99, I had to do nothing; my monthly rate automatically went down.

Seems pretty fair to me.

Re:Thank Big Tel/Cable

[evilviper]

When I go to Netflix I see "Watch movies instantly on your PC". Did I miss something?

Yes you did... Try actually USING the service. Whatever they're using does a HORRIBLE job with the conversion from DVD.

Lots of aliasing, like they use some incredibly crappy deinterlacing filter. The video is scaled out to square pixels, even though WMV supports aspects just fine. Anyone who knows one bit about video encoding will force dimensions to multiples of 16, but the videos I've seen aren't even multiples of 4... huge waste of bits. And that, unfortunately, holds true... don't even try watching at any bitrate below the max (some 6000kbps), even with a file size of 2GBs it looks like a 1-CD rip you might find floating around on some P2P network.

Their inverse telecine filter is crap, if it exists at all. Progressive DVDs (film) are encoded passably, but anime I've seen is HORRIBLE. Take Ninja Scroll, use some braindead deinterlacing filter that blurs the two fields, so you have the old telecine ghosts every 5th frame and it looks like complete crap... then drop one out of every 5 frames (but be sure to keep the horrible blurred frames) to make sure you completely destroy the picture... then you've just started to approximate what the Netflix conversion process does.