Dish to close 300 Blockbuster stores, 3,000 jobs may be lost

Reuters ^ | January 22, 2013 | Liana Baker in New York and Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore

[CatherineofAragon]

I remember the novelty of walking into a Blockbuster and being surrounded by all those movies you could actually rent and take home.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

A good alternative idea for a Blockbuster business model might be to do a licensed DVD print on demand using the Superbit model.

Superbit was an odd effort to put larger than single disk movies onto a single disk, and at a higher than usual bitrate, but with no extras, just a static menu and the movie. For example, the entire Lawrence of Arabia, at 227 minutes, fit on a single disk.

Importantly, if you pirate a Superbit disk, you got a much lower quality everything, because the movie had to be compressed. The format died off with Blu-Ray.

So the bottom line would be that people would request and pay for movies online, maybe two movies to a disk, and get something like a “rental” version that would be legal to own, and a lot lower price than a retail disk, but not have any extras, commentary, or other stuff that comes with full priced DVDs or Blu-Ray. And it would only be DVD quality.

It wouldn’t be worth it to pirate, because if they did it would look as cruddy as a “screener”, recorded in a theater.

[discostu]

They got a nice dead cat bounce when Netflix decided to irritate the customers for that summer, but it was always doomed. They’d have died quicker if Reed hadn’t hated the Redbox idea, if they were one company working together that unified front would have crushed store based rental in a year or two.