Don’t ever forget that the only reason there is such thing as BB Online and unlimited rentals is because of NETFLIX. If Netflix never existed, BB would STILL be charging you $5 – 7 for a 2-day rental on a disc that only cost them $5 – 10 to begin with.

BB is a huge corporate entity (when I worked for them, they were owned by Viacom) that did nothing to help or innovate business or their own business models.

They’re business strategy is thus: Steal it. Everything they’ve done is stolen from another company. They were extremely proud of their practice of buying up mom & pop rental stores and shutting them down or converting them to Blockbuster… so proud, they would list new aquisitions in their employee newsletters.
A district manager once told me that that he was tasked with driving around town and looking for empty storefronts of shopping plazas close to BB stores. If BB were to get wind that a competitor might try to open a store in the same area, they would sign a short term lease & rent an empty space to keep the other store from moving in.
Netflix comes out, BB has online a few years later.
Netflix does streaming… BB is attempting the same now (but will fail if the project isn’t already dead).
Gamefly comes out… a couple of years later BB does ‘unlimited’ game rentals.
Always re-active, NEVER pro-active.
Remember when they dropped late fees? That wasn’t out the kindness of their heart, that was due to all the lawsuits (which I admit are frivolous) against them over the possible legality of their late fees.

The overall point is that BB does NOT care about customers, improved business, or improved customer service and I can’t reiterate enough that it’s not just my experience as a customer, it’s my experience as an employee as well. They are just not a good company.

Final straw for me was back in 2001 when I went to 5 different BB’s to look for ONE Xbox game and none had it for rent. Each store had ONE copy for SALE, but NONE for rent. meanwhile, they had like 20 copies of Dragonball Z for PS2. Go figure. Now, I know PS2 was killing it at the time, but still… it’s a RENTAL store which means even if what I want is low demand, I expect at least one new game when it comes out. At that time, BB wouldn’t even get new Xbox games.
So I joined GameFly… which led me to Netflix and now I will never give BB my money again.

There’s more I could go on about, but I’ll stop here. You like BB, great. Good for you. Some people like taking it in the butt, good for them too. Not for me.
If Blockbuster ever dies, it was their own bad business karma.

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Well, back to ignore mode. Anyone have something intelligent to add?

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I was a longtime Netflix customer when Blockbuster sweetened the deal with unlimited store returns plus a free in-store movie every month. I switched and put up with the crappy site because there’s a Blockbuster down the street from me. I was watching more movies on Blockbuster than I ever could at Netflix because of that one feature.

Then they turned unlimited plus free coupon into 5 a month. The price stayed the same and I figured that the unlimited was unsustainable. No problem.

Then they turned 5 a month into 3 a month and dropped the coupon. And raised the price. I groused and grumbled, but I stayed because on net it was still a better deal.

Finally, they tightened the in-store return policy in some way (I can’t remember offhand) and upped the price once again. *That* was enough for me. Blockbuster clearly offered up an overly-generous package in order to siphon customers away from Netflix. Once they had them and quarterly results started to falter, they proceeded to take away the generous parts until quarterly results rebounded.

During that same period, Netflix was lowering prices, adding features, and expanding its library. That right there tells me a lot about their different corporate cultures. Netflix may not be perfect, but at least I trust them to progress in the right direction.

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Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone).

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Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone).

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Well, I know Netflix has Blu-ray, they damn well better since its in demand. And I’m just saying EVERY movie I got from Netflix had a scratch and skipped. Trust me, I don’t like to have to waste time and switching/cancelling my subscription was not a fun thing or something I wanted to do.

But its just funny that with Blockbuster I have not had one skipped disk, and I’ve rented a couple regular dvds.

Hey, maybe Blu-rays are stronger? Or maybe a lot of people don’t have the players yet, but this is just my story. Blockbuster isn’t bad…

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I dont know either. I guess its more the fact that Netflix had the better deal going on and more people jumped on that bandwagon and that when Blockbuster got their online thing going no one cared. But if you look at the side by side cost and all that stuff, there exactly the same. The advantage Netflix has is that you can view certain movies online for free and many things have Netflix integration (Xbox 360 for example).

But if Blockbuster can get this online game rental going, and not screw anything up. I personally would consider them to have the upper hand when going against Netflix, or at least be evenly matched. Each one will have their own personal advanatge, games vs online movie rentals.

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i use them instead of Netflix because i can return a mailed movie in-store for a new movie THAT SAME DAY and not have to worry about any late fees. the shipping seems to be as fast as Netflix.

i am honestly asking…why is Netflix better?

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I have not had this problem once with Blockbuster–and I can rent Blu-Ray.

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