Dish to close 300 Blockbuster stores, 3,000 jobs may be lost

Reuters ^ | January 22, 2013 | Liana Baker in New York and Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore

[2ndDivisionVet]

Dish Network Corp plans to close 300 Blockbuster stores in the United States in the coming weeks and could lay off as many as 3,000 employees, a move that comes days after the DVD rental firm's UK unit went into administration.

Dish is trying to shed unprofitable Blockbuster outlets as online retailers like Amazon.Com Inc and download sites like Apple Inc's iTunes eat away at Blockbuster's business model. The potential job cuts represent about 40 percent of Blockbuster's U.S. workforce of 7,300 people.

"We continue to see value in the Blockbuster brand and we will continue to analyze store-level profitability and, as we have in the past, close unprofitable stores," Dish said in a statement. The company did not disclose the locations of the store closings.

Some of the 300 stores are reaching the end of their leases and others are being closed based on overall performance...

[CatherineofAragon]

I remember the novelty of walking into a Blockbuster and being surrounded by all those movies you could actually rent and take home.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

A good alternative idea for a Blockbuster business model might be to do a licensed DVD print on demand using the Superbit model.

Superbit was an odd effort to put larger than single disk movies onto a single disk, and at a higher than usual bitrate, but with no extras, just a static menu and the movie. For example, the entire Lawrence of Arabia, at 227 minutes, fit on a single disk.

Importantly, if you pirate a Superbit disk, you got a much lower quality everything, because the movie had to be compressed. The format died off with Blu-Ray.

So the bottom line would be that people would request and pay for movies online, maybe two movies to a disk, and get something like a “rental” version that would be legal to own, and a lot lower price than a retail disk, but not have any extras, commentary, or other stuff that comes with full priced DVDs or Blu-Ray. And it would only be DVD quality.

It wouldn’t be worth it to pirate, because if they did it would look as cruddy as a “screener”, recorded in a theater.

[discostu]

They got a nice dead cat bounce when Netflix decided to irritate the customers for that summer, but it was always doomed. They’d have died quicker if Reed hadn’t hated the Redbox idea, if they were one company working together that unified front would have crushed store based rental in a year or two.