Blockbuster blew $8 billion. We’re still paying for it
5/4/20261 hr 1 min
A complete corporate disaster.
Blockbuster stuffed up so badly that the world started walking down a path away from one-off payments and towards subscriptions. And the best part is, Blockbuster's demise was baked in from the start. It just grew so fast the problems were hard to see... for a few years.
0:00 Intro
9:10 The VCR
19:09 The War
24:42 Hello Rental Industry
28:15 Welcome To BlockBuster
36:00 Huizenga
40:27 Viacom Era
44:51 Injured By DVD
48:59 Enter The Wolf
50:43 The Collapse
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Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsChris Kohler· Host0:00
This one is dripping with hubris. I mean, everyone in it is basically oblivious to how screwed they [laughs] are until it's too late. It's kind of what makes Blockbuster the perfect business downfall story, and it's weird because there's really no shortage of smart people in this story. I mean, the main guy started three Fortune 500 businesses. Three of them. Another one was a key person in the success of Walmart, and another one was a genius who resurrected Taco Bell in the early 1990s. I mean, they're all good at their jobs, but they failed miserably when it came to Blockbuster, and they stuffed up so badly that the entire entertainment world changed. It's arguably even bigger than that. I reckon the downfall of Blockbuster helps inform a big part of our economy now. It punctuates the switch from one-off payments towards subscriptions. Blockbuster, it stuffed up so badly that Netflix and others were able to convince the world that ongoing payments are better. Which of course they're not, really. But here we are, paying $18 or more a month for a handful of streaming services that we often just forget to cancel. In this episode, we'll talk about Blockbuster, which is a spectacular corporate stuff-up, but we'll also talk about the bigger picture that it now fits into,