Blockbuster
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Netflix to release set-top box by the end of the year?
We've been hearing about Netflix's plans to deliver movies via the web for quite a while now, and it turns out they might be doing it through a proprietary set-top box before the end of this year. During a panel discussion at an Independent Film & Television Alliance meeting, Netflix's VP of original programming, Eric Besner, reportedly revealed plans for a device that will enable customers to add movies to their queue and download them overnight, presumably to an internal hard drive. An official statement from the movie rental powerhouse to the SEC suggests, among other things, that nothing has actually been decided yet, and that if the box is real, it will only be part of a much larger plan to deliver downloaded content. It looks like we'll have to wait a while for details -- like if download-and-burn will become a reality -- but a report is apparently on the way in early 2007, describing what the company has come up with after investing somewhere between five and ten million dollars in research this year alone. So sit tight and enjoy your new Vongo subscription or wait patiently for Steve Jobs to lock down the iTunes movie store and we'll give you a heads up when we have more info. [Via Zatz Not Funny]
Man takes PSP addiction too far
An incident happened last Thursday night at a Myrtle Beach Blockbuster video where a man was seen shoving PSP games into his pants. With theft on his mind and in being approached by an employee of the rental store, he dashed out with reportedly up to 60 games, which come to a total worth of about $1,800, and escaped in a silver Mercury LeSabre bearing a rental car tag. At the time of the report, authorities had not captured the gentleman, and the story makes no mention of the suspect's face being caught on camera.[Note: That is not an image of the store in question, just a generic Blockbuster Video]
TiVo and Blockbuster partnership goes live
There's still no formal press release, but the TiVo/Blockbuster Online $30 bundle looks to be quite the done deal. TiVo leaked as much about a month ago, but now Blockbuster has a promotional page up, and TiVo has launched a page about the service and reactivated the item in their shopping cart. The bundle saves you about 8 bucks a month off of what the two services would cost separately, and includes the "3 at a time" Blockbuster rental service, but there doesn't seem to be much else going on here.[Via Zatz Not Funny]
HD-DVD titles show up on Blockbuster.com
You may not be able to rent them in the stores, but Blockbuster.com will rent you all (3) of the HD-DVDs you could ever want. Doom and Apollo 13 are listed as shipping tomorrow, as well as the delayed Million Dollar Baby, although you can't tell what is in and what isn't.If you're one of the ten thousand HD-DVD owners out there, at least you have some options. Once Blu-ray launches, we can probably expect quick online support there also, but it will be interesting to see who gets titles in brick & mortar stores first.[Via digg]
TiVo to bundle Blockbuster Online?
Our buddy Dave Zatz was poking around the TiVo store last night and stumbled upon an apparent, unannounced partnership not with Netflix, but Blockbuster Online. From the look of things, you'll be able to lock yourselves into a 1 year Blockbuster Online commitment for between $13-$15 per month over the cost of TiVo's current hardware / service bundles. Sure it sounds a bit promiscuous given TiVo's history with Netflix, but with that video-on-demand service postponed indefinitely and mean ol' Netflix looking to give Blockbuster a pounding in court, why not get a little on the side, eh TiVo?
Netflix taking Blockbuster to court
Well, you know how we do in America: if ya can't beat 'em, sue 'em. Netflix is taking Blockbuster to court in California over the latter's online movie rental service, which, while suspiciously similar to Netflix, is certainly not the second DVD rental service available to consumers. We're a little perplexed as to why Netflix would only now be taking Blockbuster to court over their business methodology (i.e. their forming a company that does subscription-based online DVD rental by mail) seeking payment for damages and not, say, Wal-Mart (oh yeah, because they already took over Wal-Mart), but something tells us they're not looking for recompense so much as they're looking for Blockbuster to get the hell off their turf.
Cringely: Apple/Blockbuster Speculation
Since today seems to be Speculation Day™, here's another one for you, this time a little more grounded in reality than Dvorak's column about Apple dumping Mac OS X in favor of Windows. Robert X. Cringely, who has a much better track record at examining the tech industry and then predicting what companies will do, has posted today a speculative and engaging article about the potential powerhouse partnership of Apple and Blockbuster."Apple's Blockbuster product strategy is simple. Start with a new iPod that has video- and audio-out capability. This iPod -- which will be just as good at playing songs as any iPod that preceded it - will be more than just a video storage device. It will be a video player. No make that plural - players - a whole family of video-out iPods, some with flash storage and others with little disk drives.Take your Video-out iPod to Blockbuster, drop it in a kiosk dock then download from the local xServe your choice of 50,000 movies. You can rent the movie or buy it and you can even choose the resolution, which may or may not affect the final price. Take the iPod home, drop it in the dock attached to your TV and watch the movie. H.264 decoding takes place in the iPod in hardware.For Apple the point here is to sell iPods to people who might not otherwise every buy one (my Mom, for example), to bring digital downloads to people who don't have broadband or even a computer, and to make it all incredibly easy. You don't even have to return the videos when you are done, since they will automatically time-out."Such a move would truly be a win-win for both Apple and Blockbuster. Apple could supply the back-end (X-Serves, X-Sans, etc.) to run such a system. They're already signing distribution deals with the movie studios entertainment distributors and it'd sell a significantly larger number of iPods to users. All Apple would need is the name recognition and physical locations of a chain like Blockbuster to make such a program work. Blockbuster would have a new revenue stream and enjoy the status of being aligned with a technically-savvy company like Apple. And let's not forget that Steve Jobs is now intimately aligned with Disney, a company that actually is somewhat clueful about emerging technology.Of course this is entirely speculation, but I think Cringely may be on to something. Apple's clearly been planning something (remember, Apple tends to plan things a least a year or two ahead of an actual release). Perhaps this is it; perhaps they're finally putting the "pod back into iPod."
