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Comment by mattbgates | Hacker News Reader

$50 million back in the early 2000s. That was how much Netflix was worth when Blockbuster was made an offer to buy it. They rejected it. Could've been a different world if Yahoo and Blockbuster weren't so afraid of change. Sad to see the end of the DVD era... kind of makes you wonder why we put so much faith in the digital cloud, for one day, maybe we will only be able to play DVDs. Then again... can't be afraid of change.

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If Blockbuster had bought Netflix, would we even have streaming or original Netflix programming?

How different would it really be though? Different name of the conpany, but I think it otherwise would not be that different today.

Likely BlockBuster could have been more stable and financed the stores for longer if they wanted to. As late as pre-corona-pandemic there were lots of little independent rental stores specialising in the one niche still available - blockbuster BluRays (and DVDs!) with what had just left the local theaters, but weren't yet widely available on streaming services.

During the pandemic there was a pause in theatrical releases and the little rental chains couldn't weather that, so they disappeared.

But yeah, not that different from today.

In a world of increasing rents, video-rental stores would have faced pressure regardless of the pandemic. And in some particularly high-rent locations, video rental moved from a store staffed with employees to automated kiosks already in the first decade of the new millennium.

Redbox is still a reasonable option for mainstream recent releases but it does mean you have to commit to watching something tonight and return it the next day-ish. Netflix was nice in that it had a huge back catalog and, when you got a disk in the mail, it was fine if you didn't watch it for a week.

At the end of the day, there are alternatives but, if you liked watching a variety of movies, Netflix DVD was a pretty low friction way of doing so.

The last rental place in my city converted to be a fancy candy and snacks store, also selling Funko Pops etc. Nothing changed except the shelves of newly released movies now stock funko pops.

> During the pandemic there was a pause in theatrical releases and the little rental chains couldn't weather that, so they disappeared.

Funny enough the pandemic was the reason I canceled my Netflix DVD subscription.

During the early days there was no information about how it spread. The DVDs are sanitized (wiping finger prints, etc.) but I wasn't sure about the sleeves. I know a number of organic things can survive for over a year without a host (fuck you ringworm) so I wanted to play it safe.

As a mail carrier during the outbreak I was deemed essential and forced to work 6 days a week. The volume increased 3 or 4 fold since everyone was at home. I touched many thousands of packages and much more mail, it took me 3 years to catch the COVID and I got it from my brother's family at Thanksgiving.

Or we might have a bunch of other streaming provider none of them in any way directly related to Blockbuster/Netflix.

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