Blockbuster Video Return?
Back in the 1990s, Blockbuster LLC, better known as Blockbuster Video or just Blockbuster, was a global brand name. Reportedly, Blockbuster had 9,094 stores and employed more than 84,000 across the U.S and countries worldwide. The peak came in 2004 before online video streaming services hit the home entertainment market.
To compete, Blockbuster had offered DVD-by-mail, streaming, video-on-demand, and cinema theatre in addition to its video stores.
Adding to Blockbuster’s demise was the 2008 global financial crisis and other video-on-demand and streaming services.
In 2010, the franchise filed for bankruptcy protection and was subsequently purchased by Dish Network. Just 1,700 stores remained at the time of the acquisition.
Blockbuster still at that time had 1,700 stores, which the satellite TV company planned to use to sell its products. Around two years later, Dish would close all of Blockbuster’s corporate stores. The company’s initial plans for Blockbuster obviously failed while it continued poking at the brand, trying ways to tie it to on-demand video services.
“There was very little risk in buying,” Dish co-founder and chairman Charlie Ergen told Bloomberg of the Blockbuster acquisition in 2012, when Dish had begun to abandon its initial strategy for the video retailer. “Worst case we break even or make a little bit of money.”
As the decade played out, all Blockbuster franchise stores would close too, until, today, there is only one left in Bend, Oregon. And that’s where things get really odd for the brand.
With a precarious foothold on existence, Blockbuster has taken on a new life. Visitors have flocked from all over the world to the last store.
News hit Twitter of plans to raise $5m to give Blockbuster a new lease of life.
Successful fundraising of $5 million would allow BlockbusterDAO to buy Blockbuster Video from its current owners Dish Network. The mission, should investors wish to accept, is to turn it into “the first-ever DeFilm (decentralized) streaming platform and a mainstay of both the Web3 brands and products.” BlockbusterDAO also has aspirations of driving the platform to become “the powerhouse in the future of the film industry.”
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