One of my chronic sights as I stroll around my neighbourhood is the four shuttered video stores, still with the ghostly type of "Blockbusters" and other independent company names on the storefronts. Dark, cluttered, unrented for months on end...
All destroyed by Netflix, the way other bricks-and-businesses have been destroyed by the Internet. All in the name of "better".
The price-hike of Netflix is so very Second Life. It reminds me of that 60 percent or more price hike on the homesteads (the void sims); on the islands before that. They did it because they could; they did it when their loss-leading low price suddenly caught them in a crunch of costs.
Netflix has the California business model of clicking and endless pushing of ads and offers -- it's relentless. A day doesn't go by that I don't try to close the window on some Netflix ad chasing me.
And of course, it's too good to be true. That incredibly low cost wasn't sustainable. Pogue claims after an extensive drilling of the Netflix exec that it's about the cost of mailing DVDs that wasn't anticipated to be such a big part of the business. He doesn't mention it, but the cost of postage going up surely is a factor.
Funny, isn't it, that people wanted DVDs in the mail, and weren't happy with just the stream. Now why do you think that was?
o some movies weren't available in the stream, possibly due to licensing issues or because Hollywood still needs to sell objects to make a living -- and that's ok
o but more to the point, some people just don't want to sit up in a chair in front of a computer screen. They want to sit on a couch or a lounge and put a DVD in a video player or hey, one of those jimmied Playstations! It's just more comfortable for them that way.
o Or maybe the streaming just doesn't work well if they get Internet outages or slow downs, and even putting the DVD into their computer and watching it sitting up in an uncomfortable office chair is still better
OK Pogue, stay on this all the way, now. Please watch this Internet dynamo that destroyed other bricks-and-mortars businesses because it was "better" and what it does, and whether it survives or even stays "better". As I said, I have at least four empty video stores shuttered in my neighbourhood (in about a 10 block radius), of Blockbusters and various independent outlets that used to rent videos. They are all gone now, and disappeared with them the *jobs* and revenue to the community that they used to represent.
Gone is the ability to stroll around aisles and pick up boxes and read descriptions and talk to real-life neighbors and store clerks about movies that we used to have, which isn't substituted by the tiny mobile phone screen or the Internet computer screen. Gone are all the independent and foreign films we could rent that just aren't offered on Netflix, which is deceptively large in its offerings but always so disappointing when you sit down to browse it.
So yeah, we get it that this Internet-driven machine put these slowpokes and bad decision-makers and failure-to-get-with-its out of business and it was all that Schumpeter creative destruction, eh?
And...for what again? Please keep your eye on that ball, and report on it honestly in 6-12-18 months.
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