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Blockbuster Working on Set-Top Box

Posted by Zonk on Thu Apr 10, 2008 05:14 PM
from the everybody-jump-in-the-pool-the-water's-fine dept.
Television Media
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Hollywood Reporter and news.com, Blockbuster will soon be announcing yet another reason not to go to a rental store. A media-delivering set-top box is in the works for the company, leveraging the store's existing competence in the industry to provide a viable alternative to iTunes, Xbox Live, and Amazon. 'There was no mention of price or how such a service would work in the report. But let's think about this: to compete with Apple TV or Vudu, the device would have to cost around $200, and rentals of movies and TV shows should be around $3 to $4 each, which would be slightly cheaper than rentals of new releases from Blockbuster currently. The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.'" I still think they're kinda doomed.
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[+] Your Rights Online: Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon? 102 comments
An anonymous reader writes "A professor at the New York Law School is arguing that Blockbuster violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 when movie choices that Facebook members made on its Web site were made available to other members of the social network via Beacon. The law basically prohibits video rental outfits from disclosing rental choice of their customers to anyone else without specific written consent. Facebook's legal liability in all of this is unclear; with Blockbuster it's a straightforward case of not complying with the VPPA, the law professor says."
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  • Doomed by the integrated computer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by athloi (1075845) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:18PM (#23030352) Homepage Journal
    I still think they're kinda doomed.

    Me too. For the last two decades, people have looked at their computers and wanted the things to be information centers. That includes media, business information, personal contacts, everything through recipes and music.

    Read our lips, big corporations. We don't want more gadgets. We want our gadgets to get more powerful and less unreliable so they save us time and make life more relaxing, not more gadgety.

    • Re:Doomed by the integrated computer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by beckerist (985855) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:27PM (#23030422) Homepage
      I would be more apt to enter into a service, where the hardware I buy would be generic. Sort of like Napster is now for all "compatible" music players.

      Basically, I want some company like Logitech to build a sweet-ass DVR-type box with the ability to CHOOSE which services I want to download/buy from.
      • I think that's ultimately the problem. With traditional physical formats, competing formats eventually die off as one format rises above the rest.

        With set-top media centers, it seems like everyone and his brother is making one. If all of the content is available to all of them, then it mostly doesn't matter. But once a major studio gets enough of a donation to be exclusive to one device, it's going to be all over. We'll have another HDDVD/Bluray war where half of the consumers lose.

        There's a reason for

    • Re:Doomed by the integrated computer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lumpy (12016) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:34PM (#23030488) Homepage
      Exactly.

      Give me a service that will work with my non MS media center PC and I'll be all over it.

      NONE of them work with the decent media centers, only a couple that kind of work with the crappy Windows MCE product.

      I want a mediaportal plugin or a MythTV plugin etc...

      support standards not specalized DRM.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NightLamp (556303)
      I don't know, I think BB has the potential to create a pretty gadgety set-top-box. Each brick & mortar location could become in effect an ISP and data-centre housing cached (edge network) copies of the movies. I think there is a competitive advantage in there somewhere.
      Add in Internet and ad-sponsored rentals and maybe this is a picture of what they're thinking -
      "a data-centre in evey BB dumpster".

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by securitytech (1267760)
      ..and history of milking their position in the market.

      Years ago, when there was really no major competitor to Blockbuster besides local mom and pop operations - they took advantage of it with $5 plus dollar a pop movies and ridiculous late return policies.

      Blockbuster joined Bellsouth in the "won't see another dime of my family's budget" bucket. And I based that decision completely on their actions when they had little or no competition, and not on current technology & trends.

      Conversely, the companies t

  • Exit Strategy (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it's time for Blockbuster to execute their exit strategy. I agree, they are doomed. With all of the existing machines listed providing similar capabilities, why would someone buy yet *another* box to hook up to their TV? And there's also Redbox....

    • Re:Exit Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zappepcs (820751) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:54PM (#23030682) Journal
      I was commenting earlier about how many businesses are going to fail in the recession due to tight margins now that won't maintain them under duress of less custom.

      If, and IMO, IF they want to stay relevant and solvent, what they need to do is keep away from lock-in business models and get on with 'we work with anything' business models. Yes, that would make for weak competition according to some, but if all you had to do was go to Blockbuster and ask the tech guy what to do to get all the movies you can handle, then sign up for their business/app/service they would only win.

      Even better if the same system they sell or advocate supports anything else that is not damned^H^H^H^H DRM'd .... but sadly, big business doesn't think that way, no, they want everyone's share of the pie, or at least everyone eating from their pie and nobody else's. Shame really, they have a lot of assets/resources to push the home video/DVR arena into common practice.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by roc97007 (608802)

      Perhaps what Blockbuster needs to do is provide a free application that runs on any computer that interfaces with their infrastructure, so you could rent and view video without buying a set-top box. I mean, the box is usually a loss-leader anyway -- the money is in rentals over the long term. So why bother inventing a new box?

      What Blockbuster's differentiation could be is to provide a player that plays well full screen with 5.1 or 7.1 sound (*not* in a browser) and plugs-into popular media center softw

      • I think a box of some sort would have to be involved, even if just as one option out of many. For most people, a software-only method means being stuck at a computer, be it sitting in the office watching movies, or clearing a space for the laptop. Few people have the hardware, experience, or inclination to make a generic PC into a media machine, and being restricted to a computer makes the service much less popularly useful.
  • Why would I buy another set-top box? Unless it can do everything that TiVo can do and better/cheaper, why bother?

    Why am I going to buy an AppleTV/vudu that's a TiVo that can't record live TV?

  • Why pay $200 for a box where your cable box can do (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe The Dragon (967727) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:22PM (#23030380)
    Why pay $200 for a box where your cable box can do the same thing with on demand with out eating up your internet bandwidth.

  • ISPs will block it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DigiShaman (671371) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:25PM (#23030406) Homepage
    It's doomed because of the major ISPs. Be it Cable or Telco, the service would consume more bandwidth than they have allocated to their customers. Second, it competes with same services they offer.
  • Perhaps their only chance is to loss lead with a consumer friendly rental package of content, just to get the devices in houses. However, unless they get pretty reasonable penetration, I can't see it working.

  • missing the boat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dzimas (547818) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:41PM (#23030554)

    The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.

    Bzzt, wrong. Blockbuster will still have to negotiate licensing agreements with the major distribution companies, just like everyone else in the game. They can't simply rip their existing DVD offerings and stream them to customers. Blockbuster's in a tough spot here; if they remain a dealer of physical media, they'll get pummeled by streaming content. Their only hope for survival is to leverage their brand and physical locations to introduce a set-top box that grabs sizable market share. The trouble is that a video rental chain is going to have an extremely difficult time going head to head with the likes of Apple. It'd be like a record chain introducing an mp3 player in the hope that they can prevent iTunes and Amazon from decimating them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Knowzy (950793)

      Bzzt, wrong. Blockbuster will still have to negotiate licensing agreements with the major distribution companies, just like everyone else in the game.

      Blockbuster is planning on streaming their Movielink library which includes ~6,000 titles. Nearly double Netflix's Watch Instantly selection with 3,800 titles [dyers.org].

      They have a huge head start in terms of licensing.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MushMouth (5650)
        Except Movielink doesn't have 6000 titles available for rent, they currently have ~1700. It appears that they have more available for purchase, but that is all they have for rent, which is most likely covered by a different agreement.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by grotgrot (451123)
      An alternative that takes advantage of their existing stores is that the device takes some sort of memory stick which you fill at the store with the content. That way they can rent digital content, and you won't have to return it. It will be quicker to put several movies on a memory stick at a store than download for quite a while. And having the settop box means they don't have to worry about getting it working with a general purpose desktop machine with all the resulting issues, can lock it down to the
  • Is for blockbuster to preload each of these boxes with 1-2TB of movies already, with monthly service contract to access the whole catalog. Additionally, they would have to send out new HDD's every so often with additional content. The Set-Top Box market is already full of on demand options. Unfortunately, knowing blockbuster they will make a 1/2 assed last minute effort to copy someone else who is way ahead of them (Netflix? anyone).
    • Netflix and LG are almost ready to roll their set top box out that ties into the "Watch It Now" feature of the Netflix site.
  • This won't work, pretty obviously. But I think Blockbuster will be around for quite a while, because I think physical dvd rentals will be around for quite a while. About half the time I rent a dvd, it's because I need something to watch pretty much immediately. Few people have the bandwidth for downloads to fill that need. Netflix and the Blockbuster mail-delivery programs both work great, but don't fulfill the instant gratification need, either. And neither rents videogames! (What a tremendous lack.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by letsief (1053922)
      I take it you haven't tried Netflix's Watch Now. You get surprisingly good quality video from cable modem speed internet. I don't think I've ever had to wait more than 10 seconds at the beginning of playback for it to finish buffering. No, its not quite DVD quality, but it's better than SDTV. That's probably good enough for most people. I think streaming video would work, from a technical perspective, for a lot of people today. I think it hasn't caught on yet because 1) the current lack of an easy way

    • That's why Netflix offers "Instant" movies and tv shows, sure it's not the entire library but they're unlimited now and they're constantly adding more. Unfortunately it's only available for Windows, but it's still a nice addition to their already exceptional service at no extra cost.

      http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070116-8627.html [arstechnica.com]

  • hooray! (Score:3, Funny)

    by sneakyimp (1161443) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:50PM (#23030642)
    I can't wait to start paying late fees when my computer can't download their movies fast enough due to my poor broadband service!

  • Existing Competence? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by greenslashpurple (1236792) on Thursday April 10 2008, @05:55PM (#23030690)
    I tried using Blockbustre for a while. But their utter incompetence at renting DVD-based products ultimately drove me away. First off they only sell you the 'child safe' versions of a lot of DVDs, so you never even get to see what the director actually intended. Once I tried going through the whole Alias program. They were missing a disk right in the middle of the last season (which I didn't find out about until I tried to rent it). They said they could not, and would not order the disk, and that this kind of thing happened all the time. And of course there were months when each time I came in they would beg me to do the online thing. The last straw was when I went to rent two movies at normal price and the clerk told me I was throwing that money away compared to what it would cost to get it online. I realized she was right, and after that I went to Netflix, and never went back. I think Blockbustre is like that Real Player company, once you've proven to be beyond a doubt how evil you are at your chosen field of business, I will NEVER go back to you.

    • I tried using Blockbustre ... I think Blockbustre is like that...
      Are you French by any chance?

  • Enron Redux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jherek Carnelian (831679) on Thursday April 10 2008, @06:04PM (#23030764)
    They tried this already...

    http://www.forbes.com/2000/07/20/mu4.html [forbes.com]

    and we all know how well THAT worked out.

  • Open, Standard, Set top box (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Thursday April 10 2008, @06:10PM (#23030802) Homepage Journal
    What dooms all of these slightly different boxes, whether cablebox, cablemodem, TiVo, or even gaming machines, is that people don't want a pile of different boxes, each one trapping them in a different "mode" in which they use their TV. Where each content mode has a different GUI, and lots of redundant overlap with the others. They certainly don't want to get locked into different boxes with different viewing modes for different sets of the same kind of content, like movies. Who wants to care whether they're watching a "cable movie" or a "TiVo movie" or a "disc movie" or a "Blockbuster movie"?

    What will replace all these boxes and modes is an open standard box that does it all with a unified GUI. It might even take "expansion boxes", to handle retrieving and decoding different data types, especially if they're as different as, say, a videogame and a newshour.

    That's why I say "game consoles" will replace all these different "media terminals". The Sony Playstation3 is probably the winner waiting for the world to catch up with it. With the imminent introduction of PlayTV [wikipedia.org], a TV decoder, the PS3's single GUI will play regular cable (or broadcast) TV and enable tivo DVR, and of course games and DVD/Blu-Ray, as well as on-demand and multicast Internet video (and music, and telephony...). Since the FCC has mandated that cablecos stop bundling set-top boxes with their networks and data (including TV data) service, the PlayTV cable decoder will fill that gap. If PlayTV had a DOCSIS modem built in, it would do it all - until then, the DOCSIS modem gets its cable from a splitter off the incoming cableco coax, just like now with the regular cablemodem, but the DOCSIS modem can plug right into the PS3 gigabit ethernet port (or one of its USB ports).

    The important difference is the integration. The PS3 has a single GUI for all that. It's also got multiple parallel DSPs ("SPUs") onchip, for fast processing all of that different media, all in parallel, all flippable around "picture in picture" (or whatever paradigm Sony brings to true multimedia). The PS3 runs Linux already on its PPC, with drivers arriving for video and other media processing on those SPUs. So even the "PC" might get sucked into this single platform.

    There will be a few years while the PS3 is still ahead of its time. In that time, Blockbuster and the others might have some markets they can reach with their dumbed-down, simple "single media" players. But they'll have to invest quite a lot into new kinds of tech they're not familiar with. All the while showing Sony what works and what doesn't, for Sony's paid-off manufacturing plants to adopt as software on the PS3s increasingly filling people's homes. Eventually the shakeout will come (not too far off), and Sony's position and diversity will win. The dominance of Sony in that landscape will also intimidate smart investors from backing competitors, further delivering the market to Sony instead.

    This analysis could also apply to other game consoles, like the X-Box. But the X-Box took a serious setback by betting on HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray, and against Sony which controls what has now won the HD format wars for physical distribution (which beats Internet speeds in the USA for the next couple years for most people). X-Box is also not able to compete with the PS3 parallelism, either in the multiple streams or in the ultimate rendering chip to the TV. And so even the leader right now, the Wii, will be underpowered for the multimedia challenge the PS3 will win.

    It's a win for us, too. Because it will work only if these different media work on open standards, which is the only way to integrate them on a single box, rather than proprietary formats on proprietary, redundant, compartmentalized boxes. Which means the overall economics and tech directions favor openness. A non-PS3 PC with the same horsepower, and 3rd party integrated GUIs could come in and compete, too. Which means you.
    • This makes more sense from a "nerd" point of view, but I don't feel it will pan out like that.

      The PS3 is not the answer, nor is any other game system. Why? Simply because they are considered "game systems" by the mainstream world, and I don't feel that will change no matter how hard Sony pushes the media center aspect of the PS3. It will fail or succeed on its merits as a game system.

      So where will the answer come from? Who knows, but I think perhaps Netflix is a good contender for creating something

  • And how does this compete with the Pirate Bay, exactly?
    • Well, if they get it right, you should be able to start watching your film instantly, instead of having to wait for it to finish downloading. Pirate Bay requires you to predict that there's nothing good on TV and pick something good to watch, anything from 30min to a few days before depending on how popular the film you want to watch is.
  • No, the only way this would work is if the customer doesn't have to buy a $200 hardware device, but can rent the box for, say, $15 month or so. Amortize the box costs like cell phone companies do.
  • Blockbuster is proposing to provide a similar service to Netflix, only at two to four times the marginal cost* AND an up-front fee?

    *It's one movie per dollar of your plan, right? or is it unlimited now?

    I mean, I see the advantage of a set-top box, but that marginal cost is going to make a lot of people think twice, non? I guess it worked for Tivo, though...

  • existing competence?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eil (82413) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:09PM (#23031304) Homepage Journal
    the store's existing competence in the industry

    C'mon, am I really going to be the first one to point out the hilarity of that phrase?
  • The device is believed to be a stand-alone product akin to Apple TV as opposed to embedding a Blockbuster-branded service in such existing devices as Microsoft's Xbox 360 or TiVo. Blockbuster eyes streaming to TVs [hollywoodreporter.com]

    It competes for shelf space, back panel connections and room on the power strip.

    It competes with the services of your cable or internet provider.

    Time-Warner owns Harry Potter. Why should it let Blockbuster in on the action?

    It duplicates the functionality already built into your DVR, video gam

  • This whole thing is rediculous and is exactly why open standards exist. I should be able to buy a settop box on my own and point it at any content providers I want over my neutral pipe (say what you will about the modem age, the telephone company had no control over the bits passing over my line). I want a Warner Bros. movie, I go to the Warner Bros. content point (some web service somewhere) and buy the movie from them. If they want to focus on their core competencies and license out the movies to someo

  • Its sure to fail (Score:3, Funny)

    by PPH (736903) on Thursday April 10 2008, @09:26PM (#23032134)

    Just like every other set top box on the market.

    With these newfangled flat panel TV sets, none of the boxes stay on top of the set. They all fall on the floor.

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