What happened to BlockBuster?
The collapse of Movie rental giants Blockbuster was a collapse that shook the industry and the economic world as a whole, but where exactly did Blockbuster go wrong?
It all began in 2006 when Netflix owner Reed Hastings met with blockbuster CEO John Antioco in Dallas, US. He proposed a partnership deal to John whereby Netflix would run them online in exchange for the advertisement of Netflix in it stores.
Unfortunately for Blockbuster CEO John, he declined Reeds offer of a partnership deal. Bearing in mind that at the time of the offer Blockbusters was a multimillion pound company with over 9,000 stores and nearly 60,000 employees. Little was they to know there fete.
Netflix went on to grow into a massively successful company that would enable its customers to easily watch movies from the comfort of there home. Gone where the days of trekking down to Blockbusters to rent a movie.
In the wake of the financial straint, Blockbusters had changed there companies structure many times over. A new CEO was appointed to run the company, unfortunately for BlockBuster the new CEO felt it was unessesary to involve the company in any online efforts.
Within 18 months, he had lost 85% of the capital value of the company. Within two years, he lost it all.
Soon after Blockbusters began to keep there customers by removing all late fees from movie rentals in a desperate bid to keep the business afloat. At it’s height in 2007 Blockbuster had 50 million members worldwide.
So the question everyone keeps asking is-
Was it Netflix who killed Blockbuster or was they doomed anyway?