The Whole Netflix Blockbuster Story : What led to Blockbuster’s Downfall?

For those of you who don’t know, Blockbuster was a popular movie and video game rental service company back in the 90’s. Blockbuster was know in almost every American household until 2010. Although they officially closed every operated single store somewhere between 2013 to 2014.

There are quite a few factors that resulted in Blockbuster’s demise including some bad decisions on their part. So let’s take a closer look on what led to their downfall, shall we?

Before we do that let me just inform you that at it’s peak, Blockbuster had over 9000 stores in the US alone and now, that number has been reduced to one. The last Blockbuster Video store is located in Bend, Oregon and is surprisingly doing well even in this pandemic. 

 Coming back to why Blockbuster vanished, the main reason of the decline was their resentment against change. There is this little streaming platform I think you know about called Netflix, when Netflix started out back in 1997,  and mind you we are talking about the original Netflix, the movie by mail subscription service not the streaming platform as we all know today. Netflix only started streaming 13 years ago. So the original Netflix was a subscription where you could get endless movies mailed to you and unlike Blockbuster, it did not charge per movie but charged a subscription fee which was monthly paid. 

Netflix back in 2000, offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for only $50 million. Which considering present day Netflix’s net worth $194 billion, was a extremely inexpensive amount. But Blockbuster found this offer ‘laughable’. This very choice of Blockbuster is what led to it’s very own downfall.

Now, what do we learn from this. We learn or at least I learned that change cannot be resisted, the world is changing rapidly and we must adapt to every situation it throws on us, if we get too comfortable in one spot for too long, The world will forget us and keep moving, and just like that we will be sitting right next to everything else that was forgotten, including Blockbuster.





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