Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

April 7, 2009

Blockbuster going kaput?

Filed under: Business, Entertainment, Media — Tags: — Raja @ 8:22 am

Blockbuster, once a high flying video rental company, may be in its last days if it can’t complete a financing deal it is working on.

blockbusterThe death knell may be ringing for Blockbuster. Today the video-rental giant admitted that if it cannot complete the financing deals that it is currently working on, there is a good chance the company may be forced to shut its doors. While the company last week said it was in the process of getting a $250 million revolving loan from creditors, that may be in jeopardy.

Why? The loan apparently has some conditions to it, and Blockbuster is now not sure it can meet them. Even worse, whether the loan goes through are not, it is not even sure that would be enough to save the company.

Blockbuster is a great case study in how even dominating companies can get disrupted as described in clayton christensen’s innovators dilemma. I predict many giant media companies to face this fate in the coming few years.

March 24, 2009

Blockbuster to stream movies to Tivo users

Filed under: Entertainment, Internet, Media — Tags: , — Raja @ 9:20 pm

Blockbuster has joined the VOD party by announcing a movie streaming deal with tivo.

The struggling video rental chain will announce a partnership with TiVo on Wednesday to deliver Blockbuster’s digital movie library over the Internet directly to the televisions of people with TiVo digital video recorders.

As with similar deals TiVo has struck to make digital video services from Amazon and Netflix accessible from its set-top boxes, no money will change hands between the companies. But Blockbuster also said it would sell TiVos at many of its 4,000 stores in the United States, taking a typical retailer’s cut of sales. The two companies plan a joint marketing campaign to promote the new service, which will start in the second half of the year.

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