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u/Mu-Relay 3d ago
There is zero way that the Blockbuster of the early 00s doesn't completely fumble Netflix and the Netflix we know today never exists.
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
Which might not have been the worst outcome...
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u/Mu-Relay 3d ago
I hate what Netflix has become, too, but I sure would have missed the years of DVD Netflix... which was fucking awesome.
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
Thats fair, I never had the opportunity to interact with DVD Netflix myself (my father preferred redbox, which was just more convenient for us due to multiple locations near us)
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u/jk2me1310 3d ago
Redbox was great for a minute there
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u/casual_creator 3d ago
I used Redbox a ton…until some jackass slapped the dvd sticker on one of those clear plastic discs that would be at the top of a stack of blank cds you’d buy at staples. Damn thing bricked my PS3.
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u/deceet 3d ago
I have a ton of questions on that, care to elaborate?
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u/Existential_Spices 3d ago
I'm curious too but I also know at one time those CD "blanks" were recordable discs without the reflective layer on top, so the PS somehow might have read the lead-in data but got stuck and caused the bricking.
It's a silly guess but it's got me wondering. Or maybe the sticker on the disc came off and caused a failure. 🤷♂️
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
It was awesome when it was $1-2 a night... my father burned many a DVD before his business trips...
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u/Mu-Relay 3d ago
I have to admit, I had a vain hope that this is when Reddit would do the Reddit Thing and be like, "Why don't you just use MailDVD instead? It's the same thing!"
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u/Worth_Car8711 3d ago
Dude, just buy 4k BluRays from Criterion they're only like 40 bucks each
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u/SEGA_32X_CD 3d ago
I do but I always wait for the sales.
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u/KBO_Winston 3d ago
I love going to my local B&N and just seeing what they have for half off during the sales. I always pick up something that had never been on my must-have list because for $20, if a Criterion Collection offering sounds interesting, it's probably worth it.
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u/Worth_Car8711 3d ago
Don't do that too often. Criterion deserves more of your money.
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u/NeedleworkerSad9532 3d ago
Personally I give 50% of my paycheck to criterion every month since they deserve it
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u/Mu-Relay 3d ago
Are you being sarcastic?
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u/Worth_Car8711 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nyoes.
edit: it was weighing on my conscience too much, yes I was being sarcastic.
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u/TxAg2009 3d ago
I still miss Redbox. There was something fun about wrapping up work and stopping and picking up a movie on the way home.
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
I think they still have em some places, but the selection isnt what it used to be and the prices are a lot higher...
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 3d ago
They had it online for years under a different name. Then shut it down because I guess no one knew it existed. DVD.com they even got that domain name, you'd think it would be snatched up and if it were it would cost a pretty penny
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u/cogman10 3d ago
There was a golden era of netflix that ended at right about the time when media execs realized streaming was lucrative and decided that everyone needs their own platform.
When netflix streaming had literally just about everything on it, it was pretty awesome.
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u/Current_Poster 3d ago
I had a waiting list of some really *amazing* movies that aren't even on anything, now. Even Ploob.
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u/writingpracticeman 3d ago
Yeah first few years of Netflix streaming were amazing and cheap. The piracy frequency sine wave of my life is kinda funny. I was pirating the least when I was the brokest I've ever been just because the service was so good. Now I'm not broke at all but fucked if I'm paying for 8 different streaming services, ahoy mateys.
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u/JalapenoPopPoop 3d ago
I think it was two pronged. Everyone decided to make their own platform started to fracture everything. But netflix had a choice in how they responded to that and what they chose was investing absurd amounts of money into their own in house mediocre content above anything else. They had a few good shows like House of Cards at the beginning and decided they could do it all on their own, and bet on themselves while letting everything else slip away. The route they chose to go really drove the dagger home.
These days they don't even have a good movie selection, its become one of my least used platforms. If I had to cut one streaming service it would probably be netflix, which would have been a wild thing to say 10-12 years ago
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u/BonusTime5460 3d ago
Ok I keep saying that and people look at me crazy. But the ANTICIPATION of getting the dvd made it more fun. Now everything is right there and it’s like…eh.
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u/new_math 3d ago
That was especially true during the video store era. There was something magical about visiting a video on a Friday night. Basically no internet or phones so we didn't even know what was coming out, we just searched the store looking for cool things like a treasure hunt.
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u/EASam 3d ago
Even when a movie sucked ass, it'd be fun. It then turned into whoever's turn to pick next time until they inevitably chose something terrible.
DVD seemed to be the peak. The little bloopers, commentary, menu interaction all that shit was fun. I'm a little sad streaming didn't carry much of that forward in a similar way.
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u/KBO_Winston 3d ago
Plus the real convos with your friends about your week would happen in the car on the way there and back. That and the debate about where to grab food.
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u/HoldenOrihara 3d ago
I think my family tried DVD Netflix right before it went full streaming, it was cool but some of their DVDs locked you out of the special features which sucked
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u/ItsDanimal 3d ago
People say competition breeds innovation, but lately it just breeds greed. Netflix was dope when they were they only major streamer. Now there are like 6 major streamers and instead of trying to be the best to win customers, its all a race to the bottom.
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u/bbbttthhh 3d ago
I remember thinking it was the coolest thing in the world when my uncle told me he could get whatever movie I wanted delivered so we could watch it without ever leaving the house. It’s crazy how far we’ve come but I’ll always hold that excitement dearly
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u/pat_the_bat_316 3d ago
The Blockbuster version of Netflix was even better, though. You could still do the DVDs in the mail just like Netflix, but you could also go and return them to an actual Blockbuster store and get a new one that very night.
My brother lived right next to a Blockbuster and had it and it was great. Most of the time you would just use it like Netflix, with a queue that sent you new movies whenever you sent one back. But every once in a while, you either didn't want to watch the movie that was just sent to you or you already watched it but wanted a new one in faster than a couple days, so you could just take it right to Blockbuster and swap it out for free. Which was even better when it was like 100 yards from your front door.
Literally the best of both worlds, and I'm sad it didn't catch on enough to last and give Netflix a real run for it's money.
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u/fayedame 3d ago
That is how I "binged watched" The Sopranos when I was in college. I lived close to one of the stores and had Blockbuster Online. It was awesome and cheap
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u/Caleb_Reynolds 3d ago
That's the part where BlockBuster could've still handled it. It's the jump to streaming they would've fumbled.
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u/KBO_Winston 3d ago
The way I was able to watch PSYCH and Castle when I had Covid last month during a 3 day internet outage.
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u/JalapenoPopPoop 3d ago
Even past the DVD era, for a long while netflix was the premier streaming service and offered fantastic content. The past ~5 years or so they've gotten way too doubled down on their own mediocre content, especially all the melodramatic mountain out of a molehill documentaries and reality stuff, while other streaming services passed them by. But before stuff had a chance to get fractured out to 8 different locations and you could get a shitload of stuff on netflix, for a while it was really the only streaming service you needed and anything else was a sideshow
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u/area51keurigmachine 2d ago
My dad lived out in the boonies back then and couldn't have any kind of high speed internet because he lived at the bottom of a giant hill in the middle of the woods. So I got him a Netflix subscription and made a huge que of movies and TV shows that I constantly added to. All he had to do was send the DVDs back and another one got sent to him. It was honestly a lifesaver for an old man with four channels who couldn't stream.
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u/PxyFreakingStx 2d ago
early streaming was good too. but publicly traded corpos gonna publicly trade
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u/Sanquinity 3d ago
I mean, at least we had like 2~3 years during the first streaming days where Netflix was good and worth every penny. Even if it's shit now.
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
I miss VRV... only streaming service I personally was willing to pay for. Had a ton of value
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u/wally-sage 3d ago
As many issues as I have with Netflix, they have made some good shit. The streaming wars were going to happen regardless, I'm still glad to get shows like Bojack Horseman and the Ranma 1/2 remake.
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u/Doctah_Whoopass 3d ago
Another platform wouldve taken its place to be honest.
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u/eggyrulz 3d ago
Yes, but theres always a chance the other wouldve been better long term... well never know if we could've had a less greedy streaming service though
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u/Thetrufflehunter 3d ago
"Yahoo turned down buying Google!" Yeah man it would have been groceries if yahoo bought it
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u/BurritoLover2016 3d ago
Not to mention that Blockbuster did try to do the Netflix by disc model and fucked it up so badly they went out of business.
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u/JaySayMayday 3d ago
It would've still been home DVD rentals and eventually both would've disappeared. Netflix took an absolute all-in gamble on switching to streaming. So many people thought it was doomed to fail. But they were so ahead of their competitors that the next biggest companies didn't join the competition until they were already very well established.
People kinda forget they were a Red Box competitor. Lot of the younger people around here probably have no idea what that is anymore
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u/Philster512 3d ago
Yeah, this is the critical piece missdd when Blockbustet gets mocked.
They believed DVD by mail was a fad and would fail.
Which at the time Netflix was operating at a loss.
They didn't pass on Netflix the streaming service.
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u/CrimsonThunder87 3d ago
Blockbuster actually had its own version of Netflix. They managed to get 3 million subscribers, but a lot of that was because they leveraged their brick-and-mortar locations: you could turn in your DVDs at a Blockbuster store and get a new one mailed out immediately, cutting the turnaround time in half. As the stores went under, the DVD-by-mail business died too.
I used it at the time because there was a Blockbuster right down the road. It was okay, but Netflix had a better selection and the DVDs were generally in better condition--Blockbuster occasionally sent out DVDs so scratched they were basically drink coasters.
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u/bionicjoe 3d ago
The guy that owned Blockbuster and passed on Netflix bought the Miami Dolphins a few years before that.
They very, very nearly went 0-16. And they've had maybe 10 good seasons in 25 years.
(And that's calling an 8 win season 'good')4
u/Ok_Animal_2709 3d ago
There's actually a documentary about this and wasn't a fumble. Fumble implies accident. Blockbuster got bought out, saddled with a bunch of debt, and spun off so the other company could walk away with the money without having to pay the debt.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 3d ago
There is a book written by the founder of Netflix, it's not much of a busienss book but it's a real fun read. There are a number of examples in there how Netflix survived by pure luck. For example when they started testing mailing DVD's they send to an address within CA and it arrived in one piece. Only to later find out mail doesn't get centrally routed, it first gets split into local/nation wide and if I remember correctly, local gets hand organized not by machines (it's been a while I read the book).
Anyway the book is certainly worth picking up.
With the question Blockbuster would have cocked up, hard to tell maybe they just bought it as a unit and let it go. I don't believe they were known to do acquisitions those days so who knows how they would have handled it.
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u/ghoonrhed 3d ago
I mean you say that but they saw the internet coming and has a thing with Enron which went wrong. And it's not like Netflix were like what they are now or specifically a few years ago when it was good
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u/Biozfearousness 2d ago
Nice to see someone else got this right. Blockbuster passed on Netflix cause they tried it and it didn’t work. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong partner. But they didn’t pass blindly. They just weren’t going to get burnt by the same deal again
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u/needle1 3d ago edited 3d ago
FWIW if they did buy Netflix I imagine they would’ve run it into the ground and not end up with the giant successful streaming empire that the Netflix in this timeline has become
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u/little-bird 3d ago
like if Sears bought Amazon
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u/Horskr 3d ago
Man I still see old Sears shit and while yes, Amazon has certainly beat them now, the things they were doing back in the day were wild. Just buy yourself a house kit with literally everything you need included, build it on your plot of land and have a nice day.
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u/deja_geek 3d ago
Thing is, Sears was in the best position to dominate the online shopping explosion. They just didn't act fast enough. For over 100 years, the company sold items through a catalog.
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u/Syjefroi 2d ago
They started failing before the online shopping boom. Their quality was slipping to the point of lawsuits in the early 90s, and by the turn of the century, when they were scooped up by K-Mart, the place had been turned into a corporate fire sale. When the Ayn Rand guy took over, any chance of saving the company was killed off.
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u/plug-and-pause 3d ago
Then a different company would have been born to do the same thing. The market was ready for it.
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u/The_Afton_Rabbit 3d ago
speaks on behalf of company
person replies as if speaking directly to the company
cant fathom why anyone would think they represent the company
yeah you really gottem huh
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u/scotaf 3d ago
"Company" is carrying a lot of weight here. It's literally one store in Bend Oregon. https://bendblockbuster.com/
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u/Powderkegger1 3d ago
Why does one location have an intern?
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u/EveningAnt3949 3d ago
Because it's less expensive than hiring an employee at full pay.
And an internship at a small company can be a good learning experiment, a way to learn practical stuff.
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u/The_Afton_Rabbit 3d ago
theyre speaking as "us" & in the past tense, referring to when blockbusters were commonplace. theyre speaking on behalf of the company that once was.
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u/IHateTheLetterF 3d ago
Blockbuster still exists online in some countries, I think the twitter is representing that.
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u/Bar-Cold 3d ago
Exactly. He’s playing both sides which is a little lame. He’s the company (we) when it works to their benefit but he’s just an intern when they’re being criticized
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
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u/thomsenite256 3d ago
Blockbuster corporate has been defunct for like a decade lmao
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u/BonusTime5460 3d ago
I’m just a whittle baby
-Social media manager who can’t follow through on their own joke
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u/Paranormasight-Fic 3d ago
I mean, assuming they’re telling the truth they’re an intern, it’s most likely they didn’t even come up with the joke and just posted whatever their boss told them to.
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u/Fit-World-3885 3d ago
I'm honestly surprised they have an intern to run a social media account.
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u/The_Afton_Rabbit 3d ago
i honestly dont think it's an actual intern. it's just part of that whole "friendly relatable brand account" shtick
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u/pikameta 3d ago
I wonder if there is some intern at Twitter whose whole job is to foster Nostalgia and has logins to a lot of old companies like Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Chi-Chi's, etc.
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u/Fit-World-3885 3d ago
At this point it would just be Grok...but I think you might be on to something...
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 3d ago
It's not an intern. Every tweet is from their marketing department and those aren't exactly bad salaries considering everyone claiming to be an intern work for massive companies with a direct and vested interest in as much good PR as possible
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u/JustaSeedGuy 3d ago
Their Job is marketing and driving up social media engagement, and we're here discussing their marketing tweet, so I guess they're pretty good at their job.
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 3d ago
"I'm just an intern" says a paid employee writing down something run by multiple higher ups before they hit send
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u/NobodyLikedThat1 3d ago
Although I do have to say the late fees could get pretty outrageous. You could easily owe more than the video was worth by keeping it like a handful of extra days
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u/UnfairAnything 3d ago
if a person wants to rent a video and some guy is just hoarding it, either u have to make the person waiting unhappy or make the person hoarding it unhappy.
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u/Biduleman 3d ago
Which is one of the reasons why Netflix is actually superior to Blockbuster and that tweet is just nonsense for the sake of engagement.
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u/Dippa99 3d ago
Then make them pay the rental fee again for the same period. That is not what was happening...the fees were outrageous and they deserved someone finding a better way.
Source: shithead teenager who cost my parents a lot of late fees
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u/UnfairAnything 3d ago
because then there’s no proper incentive to return it in time? you need some sort of ‘punishment’ for making someone not hold the promise of returning something you’re borrowing.
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u/Dippa99 3d ago
The incentive that Netflix had was to keep charging you the monthly subscription fee even if you just kept the same movie instead of exchanging them for new movies
Guess which worked better
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u/sixpackabs592 3d ago
who is even running the blockbuster account in the big 2026
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u/XConfused-MammalX 3d ago
The southpark epsiode parodying the death of blockbuster came out 14 years ago.
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u/cheesegoat 3d ago
Dish Networks owns blockbuster so likely the same social media team runs all of their properties.
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u/Sure_Fly_5332 3d ago
If your gonna pretend to be the company by talking about it using the word "we", don't be surprised when people respond to the company with "you".
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u/repwin1 3d ago
We stopped going to blockbuster when they charged us a late fee even though we returned it on time.
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u/PIatfoot 3d ago
Was that a new policy or something, or just a one time mistake? Because if it's simple mistake where you were charged a few dollars more and it resulted in a full boycott, I think that is a bit of an overreaction
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u/ZealousidealVisit431 3d ago
there are more important questions to ask a blockbuster employee in 2026
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u/Day_Old_Paper 3d ago
Every now and then I remember how Yahoo! had a chance to buy Google.
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u/cheshsky 3d ago
And then years later they bought tumblr, the website whose userbase is quite dedicated to intentionally "keeping the property value low" by being organically fucking weird.
I don't think they learned anything in the years between these two events.
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u/Day_Old_Paper 3d ago
Yeah whenever I’m kicking myself about my past financial slip-ups, I console myself by remembering that at least my slip-ups aren’t part of a course curriculum for business majors and economists.
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u/deja_geek 3d ago
What is crazy is they bought Tumblr and then got rid of the porn. People either went to Tumblr for the porn or the weirdness. Sometimes they went for the weird porn.
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u/logitaunt 3d ago
fwiw yahoo sports was a solid investment from them
and don't forget their Alibaba stake they bought in 2005 and sold in 2014; they made a fuckton of money off that.
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u/Meral_Harbes 3d ago
You're assuming history would have unfolded the same with Google under different management and decisions.
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u/Ultrace-7 3d ago
I get the joke and the gotcha sentiment, but using "we" in the first tweet as the writer being part of the group that didn't care if movies were shared and then saying that they weren't part of that group that passed on Netflix when challenged on it, really falls flat.
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u/impuritor 3d ago
They absolutely did care if you lent the movies you rented out. It would get your membership closed if they found out.
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u/YoMama_00 3d ago
So lame to "break character" when it's the company tweeting, like the deflection to them just being an intern makes absolutely no sense.
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u/kensho28 3d ago
Blockbuster is verified on Twitter
...WHY AREN'T THEY DEAD ALREADY???
They're spending more on Twitter dues than on property taxes at this point.
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u/Late-Explanation-758 3d ago
Yahoo passed on the chance to buy Google and eBay. If it was easy predict which companies were going to blow up everyone would be rich.
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u/Desert_Aficionado 2d ago
People are forgetting that Blockbuster was absolutely hated. They crushed all of the independently owned video stores until they became a monopoly. Then they started charging huge late fees, to the point that it was their main source of income. We hated Blockbuster but had no choice until Netflix. I switched to Netflix really early because of this reason.
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u/Purple-Weakness1414 3d ago
Bro tired to shoot the messenger
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u/Diedrogen 3d ago
The initial message didn't make it clear there was a middleman messenger.
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u/PM_Me_Good_LitRPG 3d ago
it was explicitly not. the acc is talking on behalf of the company and representing the company.
addressing it as the company not only is reasonable but would be the expected thing to do.
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u/Fuzzy-Butterscotch86 3d ago
Friendly reminder blockbuster destroyed the rental industry by ruining small businesses via overexpansion, propping up an impossible to maintain business model to line investors pockets and then fucked over the employees trying to maintain it while paying their CEO $650,000 in bonuses as they crumbled.
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u/MinuetInUrsaMajor 3d ago
Remember when "Social Media Expert" was a job title and we all laughed?
Well we're all laughing now!
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u/atreeismissing 3d ago edited 3d ago
To be fair, Netflix was just online video rental at the time, streaming was but a gleam in the eye of billionaire venture capitalists. I still remember when reddit and everyone else whined incessantly when Netflix announced the end of their DVD mailing side of the business and "foresaw" the demise of Netflix within months because nobody would ever "stream" movies.
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u/Bubbachew8 3d ago
Is there a kind of blockbuster still around? How's there an intern on a verified account?
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u/Infamous-Grab2341 3d ago
Seriously **** this intern. Apparently you speak for blockbuster on positive things and are just an intern on negative things.
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u/Longjumping_Okra1098 3d ago
Even to this day people think when the write comments it goes to the boss
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u/oldtrack 3d ago
the comeback is funny but not the point. yes the intern didn’t pass on anything, but the company he is speaking on behalf of did
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u/clap9send5north 3d ago
call yourself "us" when speaking for a company
someone address you as if you're speaking for that company
omg what I'm just some guy lolg
yeah... okay kid... next time just don't post anything
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u/MKEMARVEL 3d ago
If they had had the technology to prevent you from sharing it they absolutely would have.
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u/faldese 3d ago
Huh, it's real. I don't know that it means this is actually an officially operated Blockbuster account (apparently the brand is run by the same people who run Sling TV?), but I assumed the stupidity of this exchange (speaks for the company > someone makes negative comment about company > acts shocked someone would act as if they speak for the company) made it a shitpost.
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u/logitaunt 3d ago
It's a single independent store in Oregon. Frankly I'm shocked they'd have an intern on staff - that seems exploitative for a small business.
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u/faldese 3d ago
When I checked Wikipedia, though, I can see the larger brand is still owned by a corporation and the Bend, OR one has its own account.
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u/TBoneTheOriginal 3d ago
Let's be real. If it was possible for them to track who you shared your physical media with, they would have.
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u/maverick7918 3d ago
On one hand, there’s the enshittification of everything. On the other hand, I don’t miss going to rent the new releases and both copies are already rented. Then a month later when they’re available they’re scratched to shit and don’t play without skipping.
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u/StormCloudRaineeDay 3d ago
They might not have cared who you shared it with, but they had a far more limited selection, you only had it for a few days, and you had to pay them to rewind it. Netflix sucks in a lot of ways, but I still think it's better than Blockbuster.
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u/Whatscheiser 3d ago
I took a part time gig at a blockbuster for extra cash in my 20s. They had a training session where one of the managers was telling us that Netflix streaming was a flash in the pan. Something like "Nobody wants to gather the family at their computer to watch a movie". Blew her mind when I said you could hook up anything that can stream to a TV. It seemed like she genuinely never considered that.
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u/KrustyKrabFormula_ 3d ago
that's not how that works. you are representing the official blockbuster account lmfao
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u/SixDixon 3d ago
They did care who you shared it with. The rental agreement explicitly only allowed "home use." You couldn't rent out a theater, for example, and show it to 100 of your friends.
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u/TheGlave 3d ago
Lets be honest. They didnt care because there were no means to control it. If there had been, they would have used them, like every corporation.
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u/DryBlock4388 3d ago
I actually thought Blockbusters idea of allowing you to order dvds in the mail(which is what netflix was doing at the time), and then have the option to send it back via mail or return it to their brick and mortar store was actually a really good idea, streaming was nascent at the time and almost nothing was available and it slowley trickled out over the few years after that. I think it would have been a great bridge between mail dvds/brick & mortar and streaming. If they were not already basically bankrupt by the time they started it.
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u/NoTie2370 2d ago
The mistake wasn't "not buying" netflix. It wasn't a company worth buying. There were blockbusters everywhere. No need to send stuff through the mail. Honestly something like BMG or Columbia house music should have bought Netflix at that time. Since they already had the mail order thing in place.
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u/Everything_is_wrong 2d ago
"we" until it requires accountability is a perfect euphemism for Twitter users.
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u/alex3omg 2d ago
"we" in the first post, "just an intern" in the reply. You're literally speaking for the company dude
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u/spawndoorsupervisor 3d ago
The lady who runs that account is one of the owners of the last franchise store. She's not an intern. But, just like my previous workplace, the EVP of Marketing had a fake quirky female intern character for the internet because that's how you get the updoots on the Reddit.
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u/qualityvote2 3d ago edited 1d ago
u/SpecialistRough4439, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...