Benjie

On the horizon, Blockbusters number of competitors should steadily increase from new emerging technologies. If Blockbuster extends into the realm of VOD, Legal Movie Downloads, or Digital Video Recorders (DVR), it must realize there are existing and powerful players in these markets already. This new technology is shaping the market for many deals or partnerships. They will face fierce competition, but in the future, Blockbuster must not find it self on the outside looking in.

The movie rental industry is a living industry; there are constant changes with advances in technology, rights management, and the slow, but steady, move away from physical Media. Companies such as Netflix, Hulu, RedBox, and Blockbuster are being forced to look at new business models and try to keep up with these changes.

Blockbuster implemented a new strategy for customers to access their rentals in “five channels of distribution: in-store, by mail, through vending machines and kiosks, online, and at home (direct to the TV)” (DATAMONITOR, 2009). However, this strategy was a reactive approach to the problem produced ten years behind schedule. Wooldridge et al., (2007) stated that Blockbuster should select and adapt their strategy to respond to the fast changing market and maintain a competitive position. This was an obvious failure for Blockbuster. The changes in the market produced a decline in profit at a faster pace than the strategies that Blockbuster implemented to combat these losses.

Fritz, Ben. (April-2011). "Dish Network wins bidding for assets of bankrupt Blockbuster." In the Los Angeles Times. Retrieved March-17, from the website;

Blockbuster used to have so much power in the movie rental industry until Redbox and Netflix have come to the market. One of Porter’s five forces

Blockbuster Entertainment, Inc. was once a highly successful and profitable brick and mortar home movie and video game rental store. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had up to 60,000 employees and more than 9,000 stores. The idea behind Netflix came from an unsatisfied, embarrassed customer of Blockbuster, Mr. Reed Hastings, now CEO of Netflix, paid a $40 late fee because he returned the movie Apollo 13 six weeks later (Zarafshar, 2013). He began to contemplate ingeniously about a notion to change the movie-leasing pattern into a more pioneering industry. In 1997 Netflix was started as a DVD rental-by-mail business without subscriptions. In 1999, taking a stride additional in the direction of evolving the industry, Hastings began the subscription-based business mode based on renting DVDs by mail with plans reliant on the quantity of titles taken at a time. Netflix put forward 120,000 titles for limitless monthly DVD rental with free shipping no late and per title fees. Since that time Netflix has become one of the most popular subscription services in the world, and is now valued at over $28 billion and steadily increasing. What factors contributed to the success and failure of these two companies?

Motion pictures are a key driver of the market for entertainment products, one of the largest export markets in US. Motion picture industry consists of three stages: studio production, distribution, and exhibition. The studios produce the lifeblood of the industry, the films that are its content. The biggest players at this level are the majors, big studios which integrate production and distribution, as do the slightly smaller mini-majors. The next stage is distribution. Distributors are the intermediaries between the studios and exhibitors. Distribution entails all steps following a film’s artistic completion including marketing, logistics, and administration. Distributors coordinate the manufacture and distribution of

What role has Netflix played in the development of Blockbuster’s strategic planning? How important is Netflix to Blockbuster’s future strategic plans?

4. The bargaining power of buyers: The outlook for the target market isn’t favorable for the movie industry because it will not be growing as fast as the overall population. Buyer power is a strong force because of the target market and several other factors including: the undifferentiated product offered, switching to an alternative is simple and low cost, and customers can stay home and watch movies. The consumers are also complaining about concession and ticket costs, along with the advertisements before the film is shown.

Blockbuster’s restructuring of the company under its new owners shows how they were open to organizational change. The text describes organizational change as the movement of an organization from one state of affairs to another. Blockbuster completely changed their strategy and technology in order to compete with the new technology based companies that put them in this position in the first place. Simply put, no one visited the stores to rent movies when they could just turn on their television to order on-demand showings for the exact same price without leaving their home or grab a couple movies for a dollar apiece while grocery shopping. If they did not change they were sure to fail as a business and the company would disappear into the long list of companies that failed in the economic recession. The change was forced by other companies’ utilization of technology that caused a drastic change in the market conditions. This shift enabled the cheaper, more convenient home entertainment to steal a huge chunk of market share from Blockbuster’s traditionally structured company. Blockbuster enjoyed a long period on top of the movie rental/ home entertainment industry and this could possibly be what caused the success of these newer

The competitive forces in the movie rental industry are quite strong, as I will explain through the five forces model. There are a vast amount of substitutes for watching a movie. You can go to a play, sporting event, concert, out the lake/beach, go for a run, watch regular television, go shopping; I could go on and on. Also, torrenting or pirating movies is growing increasingly popular. Buyers have a strong presence in this industry mainly because they are picky about how much they will pay to rent or stream a movie. With the amount of substitutes and their pickiness, they make this

untouchable and we were all doomed to a lifetime of late fees and limited movie

The strategy canvas shown in Figure 1 captures how Netflix’s strategy differs from Blockbuster’s and their areas of differentiation. Netflix shifted their focus to alternative new offerings, building on critical success factors that could not be matched by Blockbuster, even when they entered the online video rental.

The presence of Netflix and Blockbuster in the movie rental industry has assisted me in developing this analysis of each corporation’s strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as followed:

Before the advent of movie rental stores, to watch a new movie, people had to go to theatres or cinemas spending a lot of money. Video rental was the answer to the new needs. Since the 90s, video rental industry has become a very big business; in those years, rental prices rose as more and more people began renting movies. At the same time, new players entered the market creating strong competition inside the industry. In the last years, the field of home entertainment has changed dramatically because of the presence of Internet and new technologies (Recorded DVD & Video in the United States, 2009).