Blockbuster Files Bankruptcy

we have a blockbuster card thing. i mean we dont use it that often but it is nice to have the option of a spur of the moment night in DVD/Blu-Ray. Blu-ray especially because they are expensive to buy outright, especially if its a duff movie and obtaining a film of equal quality and then having the hardware to play it is time consuming and a faff when jury rigging a laptop/hifi/tv set up across your living room.

but having said that, once decent broadband is avaliable to everyone and is cheap to buy and doesnt have these arcane download limits. everyone will just stream, a virtual product... from a server farm.
 
Der Stig said:
They weren't selling systems at the one near me- I tried to get a 360, but no luck.
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Sometimes the employees will either snarf them or just refuse to sell them so they can get them for cheap themselves when the place finally closes.

otispunkmeyer said:
we have a blockbuster card thing. i mean we dont use it that often but it is nice to have the option of a spur of the moment night in DVD/Blu-Ray. Blu-ray especially because they are expensive to buy outright, especially if its a duff movie and obtaining a film of equal quality and then having the hardware to play it is time consuming and a faff when jury rigging a laptop/hifi/tv set up across your living room.

but having said that, once decent broadband is avaliable to everyone and is cheap to buy and doesnt have these arcane download limits. everyone will just stream, a virtual product... from a server farm.
Click to expand...

This was the final straw that broke Blockbuster USA's back - and they're appearing everywhere over here. http://www.redbox.com/

They're starting to get almost as ubiquitous as pay phones used to be.
 
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we have these rental booths too, the last one i saw is actually in a local cinema. guess their thinking is, go see the movie, come out and rent some similar movies from a vending machine. they're pretty cheap but as is the usual here in the UK, the pricing is just way off i think. its not much cheaper than going to blockbuster.

piracy must play a part in these things, i mean the little local video rental place round the corner from my house in middlesbrough went out of business not long after changing most his inventory to DVD. several people i knew would rent the DVD's from there and using things like DVD decrypter and DivX maker they would make pretty good 700-800mb rips to CD's and at the time you could buy DivX certified players for about ?100 or less. eventually once most of his inventory had been copied, that was it...the customer numbers dwindled. it didnt happen with VHS because that was a proper mission to try get a good copy using 2 VHS machines. going digital made it easy.
 
You know that the DVDs Blockbuster get are hugely expensive and are supposed to give them a period of exclusivity when if you want to see a film you either go to the pictures or you rent from Blockbusters but can not buy the DVD retail. One of the real reasons behind region encoding, in one market you would be just starting to show the picture, in another it would be in the grace period when Blockbuster et al have the exclusive rental rights and in a third the DVD has come out - well obviously you do not want Europe (Region2) flooded with cheap US retail copies of the film (Region 1) Blockbuster will want to know why they are pay 60 - 70 GBP for each copy when they are available for say 10 USD.

Of course we very quickly got chinese players with all region capability, PAL 60 capability and TVs that can play PAL-60 and NTSC too - all the bases covered for the informed - or you can copy and hack a copy of a DVD on a PC with various free downloadable packages for the PC literate.
 
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