Blockbuster Eyes Digital Movies

By Ed Oswald | Published March 10, 2006, 3:15 PM

Blockbuster's CEO gave hints in a conference call Thursday that the company may be looking at ways to digitize its business through online rentals or digital delivery. This follows a tough 2005, where the company faced increasing pressure from online DVD rental service Netflix.

Blockbuster is already an investor in the online video service CinemaNow, however CEO John Antioco said a profitable business model has yet to emerge in that space. Thus, any first move outside of its standard in-store rental business would likely be to some Netflix-like scenario.

The two companies engaged in a price war last year, spending over a quarter billion dollars to advertise their services. Antioco said Blockbuster did not plan to relax its spending, promising that aggressive marketing plans would continue.

"We want as many subscribers as we can get and we are going to be aggressive in getting as many subs as we can," he said.

According to figures provided by Blockbuster, online rentals will expand to 20 million households by the end of the decade, with in-store revenue falling some 25 percent during that same time period. Even with the decline in store revenues, Blockbuster would continue to work at expanding its market share in the space, Antioco added.

Comments

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Ive tried both blockbuster and netflix, and I prefer blockbuster.

You get in-store rentals on top of the ones in the mail, and the delivery was faster than netflix in my experience.

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Blockbuster is teh dinosaur

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i used blockbuster online and always recived my movied 2-3days late and never had anything in on stock and very limited amount of movies. Also very difficult to find movies. I didnt like it. I have used netflix for yeas and nothing has come close to it.

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I rented from Blockbuster for a while, but I decided to try Netflix after receiving a few unplayable movies over the course of several months. Out of the first 6 movies I rented from Netflix, 3 of them were unplayable, including one that was broken in half. I went back to Blockbuster.

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Blockbuster is dying.

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