Blockbuster to offer in-store downloads

Two years ago, Blockbuster, once king of the movie-rental business, verged on bankruptcy. It seemed that the giant may have fallen.

Thankfully for the company's shareholders and loyal customers, it appears now that someone in the corporation must have caught on to a little thing called the Internet. Since its near collapse, the company has set up Blockbuster Online, which allows customers to order DVDs right to their door. (Sound familiar?) A few months ago, Blockbuster reported positive earnings for the first time in nearly 11 years, and in keeping with this newfound technological savvy, declared this week that it will offer in-store downloads sometime in the near future.

Chairman and CEO James Keyes told the press that apparently the company is going for an "ATM-like experience," where customers can download entire movies in a mere 30 seconds.

Related links:
Blockbuster.com
Yahoo! Finance: Summary for Blockbuster, Inc.
YouTube: Blockbuster Ghost

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2 Comments

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By Darcy McGee on June 1, 2008

Doesn't "in store" defeat the purpose of "download?"

It seems to me that people download so they don't have to go the store.

30 seconds for an entire movie? If massively compress a DVD to 700MB (some artifacts will be visible, but on average acceptable quality) it takes me about 1.5 minutes to copy that file from one hard drive to another using USB2.0.

Perhaps Blockbuster knows something I don't, but I can't see how they'd make it faster than that. I'd also assume that they'd want to be distributing films of higher quality than those.

By Jay Dizzo on June 6, 2008

I would assume they mean 30 secs to download from a central server to the in-store kiosk. Customers will prob have to wait for it to then transfer to whatever they plan to play it on.