Hacker Cinema
Blockbuster
2017 · Film · 85 min
Directed by July Hygreck
Dumped over a video he made to amuse his ailing dad, a heartsick Jérémy hatches an elaborate scheme to win back his superhero-loving girlfriend, Lola.
3 negative9 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
>Blockbuster should have eliminated late fees and offered DVDs by subscription in-store, but they made too much money off the late fees.
FWIW they did do exactly that. It was a monthly subscription fee, you could have three movies or games out at a time, no late fees. I don't remember what the plan was named but I think it was movie pass, to start a new membership you typed "pass" into the terminal. It was pushed somewhat strongly in store I remember having a new sign ups quota per shift.
So strange that this somehow became a relevant tidbit in a post about Borland ignoring Macs.
We had tons of stuff. First off, bikes. We biked, biked, biked everywhere all the time.
Model rockets. Water balloons. Oh yeah, if someone replaced their kitchen cabinets, there'd be cabinet doors in the alley to use as... a bike jump.
Soccer or kickball in the alley. Walkie-talkies. Cops & robbers. A swingset to jump off of.
Computers. We all had computers; my clique had Ataris. Also records. Movie theaters. Blockbuster.
The public pool. The beach.
Slot cars. I had a slot-car set, up in our attic.
And none of that stuff was expensive, except the computers.
Growing up in the '80s was great. And today, we have mastery of technology but weren't shackled to it as kids. Growing up today seems like a stressful, distracted, and rather empty affair.
Online phone books are not as complete. People lose their digital photos. Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now. Politicians don't read pleb Twitter accounts.
Blockbuster is not merely the name of a defunct video rental chain, but also a word that means “hit movie” (popular film that everyone sees).
First sale doctrine protects your right to rent out a copy that you own to one person at a time. Since movies are in high demand when they first come out and the demand tapers off quickly, this alone doesn't create a very appealing economic model for rentals. At $20 per DVD it's hard to make back your cost. So the studios have offered rental outlets deals in the past.
I actually don't know the details of Redbox. The specific example I remember is Blockbuster video, which used to get copies of movies for virtually free, in exchange for sharing a portion of their profits with the studios: https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-movie-rental-stores-e-g-Blockbuster-company-pay-for-each-movie
I think the studios agreed to this because of market segmentation, for any given movie there are people who have no interest in paying $20 to own it, but will pay a few bucks to rent it once or twice. If the studios didn't support this model they'd be leaving money on the table.
> Google has 80% of the search market. Facebook controls 70% of social media.
Wrong way to think about this. If you talk about advertising monopoly, sure. But you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument on a monopoly of free products.
> Netflix put Blockbuster and every other movie rental store out of business.
That's because Blockbuster was, quite frankly, shit. They failed to adapt to the internet. So what? Times move on. Netflix is far far better for consumers.
Something isn't a monopoly just because it's popular.
The most likely successor to Capitalism is not Socialism but Anarchism. The transition looks like this:
Decentralized infrastructure for commerce allows individuals to compete with corporations on a level playing field. In other words, Uber for Everything on Ethereum. You will know this has happened whenit is just as easy for a college student to hire a semiconductor design team as it is for Tim Cook, so long as the college student has their business model in order.
Another way to think about this is "AIs take away the finance jobs".
That will (largely) negate the competitive advantage of capital, people will realize there are plenty of resources to go around, stop working so many hours, and eventually stop thinking about money during daily transactions like feeding each other, fixing things, fabricating personal items, etc.
This will, with respect to resource allocation, represent a successful transition from "Capitalism" to "Anarchism" * , although money will still be used for certain activities involving superpersonal (more than what a person needs) amounts of resources (yachts, blockbuster films, musid festivals, etc). And some locales will stay under a propertarian regime. Regulatory capture is too slow to tip the balance of power back to Capital, although it will cause some hiccups along the way.
* Besides the dissolution of property, Anarchism also suggests changes to social expectations around state-sponsored violence, but that's is a whole other discussion. I am not aware of a satisfying story for how that goes down.
Blockbuster failed for many reasons of their own doing, but I think that it is overlooked that they also failed because they couldn't outlast several years of Netflix dumping VC cash into a fire for good content. Now, in the classic SV "disruption" playbook, Netflix has stopped paying for quality content, excluding their own mostly mediocre content, and I am left wish that the blockbuster near my house was still open so that I could go out and rent a decent movie. So much of the Netflix catalog is absolute bargain basement garbage these days and it doesn't look like that is about to change anytime soon.
Maybe one day we'll be able to access quality content from the big players, but I think there's an equal chance that we'll look back at a time when you could go and get access to a ton of classic movies from any studio and almost any time period without having to buy it upfront in a single consolidated location and feel like we've really lost something with our current state of affairs.
So, it was before Satellaview, but I lived in Japan in 1993 when I was sixteen, and it was the best time in my life. But I also was a giant f*ing nerd. Here are some things I remember, with regard to "retrofuturism": a Blockbuster video VHS kiosk that rented you movies, ala Redbox (in 1993!); Minidisc everywhere; waitstaff with wireless "notepads" that looked like old TI calculators, to type in your order that would send it back to the kitchen automatically. Akihabara was literally like being in a cyberpunk novel, I would drift past a salvage electronics part store, squeeze between some shops and up a darkened, narrow staircase and wander into a backroom stuffed to the ceiling with laserdiscs and commercial 8MM video cassettes.
On the other hand, most places didn't take credit cards and I saw very few personal computers compared to the USA at the time. So it really was a strange, uneven retrofuturism.
Have you really thought this through? For example, here are 3 possible search queries:
1) Is Blockbuster Movie any good?
Here the opinions of your friends might be more valuable to you, as valuable to you, or less valuable to you, depending on how important it is to you to have the same taste as your friends or whether you consider their movie tastes similar to your own.
2) Courtship rituals of early-modern spain
Here the opinions of your friends are almost certainly less relevant than that of a bot, unless you run in a very niche circle.
3) Directions to Skyline Chili
Here the bot is almost definitely a better choice than your friends.
Lastly, you always have to fall back to a bot because most searches are not going to have many results that friends have actively curated. So bots will continually have a place in search, and I would argue will because more important over time, as they become smarter.
It sounds like a non-prediction with all the "could be the beginning".
Some people would also do well to remember that there's a world outside America where Netflix, Hulu, etc. don't exist at all.
I stopped using Blockbuster, because there selection of movies and TV was awful - as were their prices[^1] - but YMMV.
[1]: I could buy a discounted movie for the same price of renting it with bargain bins and sites like Play.com
This reminds me of the demise of the brick and mortar chain Egghead Software, which was coincidentally adjacent to the Blockbuster in the town where I grew up. I realize it's not exactly the same because it's not like broadband/streaming/Netflix killed Egghead; however, Egghead and its contemporaries were the only way, at one point, to really see (and salivate over) the latest and greatest software titles. How many standalone software stores do you see these days?
Definitely, the days of the blue-chip brick and mortar movie rental operations are over. Blockbuster has attempted to enter the RedBox kiosk market.. but IMHO, it's too little, too late. Even that market has a very limited life expectancy.