Abandoned - Blockbuster Video

what's up guys my name is Jake welcome to abandoned episode 19 this is the show where we talk about some of the coolest abandoned places in the world we all know how I kind of have a secret love for abandon retail and I figured we should talk about one of the most famous examples of such that one company in particular that practically invented the movie rental service and that's blockbuster now I'm assuming most of you that are watching this have some understanding of what blockbuster was but if you don't I'll give you a quick rundown on it basically blockbuster was a video rental service which retailed its services throughout the United States Canada Japan Australia the UK Peru Ireland Denmark and Brazil its massive and public downfall left hundreds of stores completely abandoned so in 1985 during the downturn of the oil industry in which he worked in software a man named David Cooke founded a video rental store called Blockbuster the store opened in Dallas Texas and already blockbuster was vastly different than all the other video rental stores for instance Blockbuster had an expansive library of video titles and selected certain titles based on the stores geological location they also refused to sell adult films which made it very family-friendly and different to other stores David knew he was successfully tapping him to rather bear in the market so the following year he opened up another three stores under the blockbuster name in September of 1986 an article was published questioning his leadership in the chain which caused him to abandon his plan public offering following this in 1987 David sold a large portion of the company to a group of investors one of which being Wayne whose enya I'm almost positive I said that name wrong anyway he was the founder of waste management Inc was a kind of a massive company at the time later that year actually David Cook departed from the company which left Wayne as the new CEO this move prompted a massive expansion of stores and in 1988 as their new headquarters moved to Fort Lauderdale Florida blockbuster was now America's leading video rental store with over 400 location for fun now following their lawsuit with Nintendo of America they were now legally allowed to rent video games which was a big step so by the early 90s blockbuster now had over three thousand four hundred stores Blockbuster would also do this thing where they would literally just buy out its competition and convert the competitors stores into their own so with all this success in 1994 Blockbuster merged with Viacom for reported eight point four billion dollars following this deal the company's leadership sort of changed a bit which led to the company changed its name in 1996 to Blockbuster Entertainment Inc and all its retail stores from Blockbuster Video to just blockbuster during this time the company relocated back to Dallas Texas from their previous Fort Lauderdale headquarters and by the time 1997 came around a man named Reed Hastings received a $40 late fee from returning the movie Apollo 13 late with his frustration Reed founded a company you may have heard of it before called Netflix the company launched on April 14 1998 as a paper rent model which would allow DVDs to be sent through the mail the company began building a model where an individual would pay one flat fee of unlimited rentals without due dates and late fees anyway back a blockbuster in 1998 the company founded dej Productions which will require films that would be exclusively sold at Blockbuster stores like us rented that occurred a moment that would haunt the company for the rest of its existence in 2000 Netflix was offered to Blockbuster for fifteen million dollars however they declined the offer now to be fair though at the time blockbuster did make over 800 million dollars just on late fees alone so at this time they were doing just fine so as Blockbuster still grew it hit its peak in 2004 when the company had over 9,000 stores globally and employed over 60,000 people which is kind of insane Blockbuster also separated itself from Viacom during this time and by the end of 2004 blockbuster was evaluated at five billion dollar as Netflix grew with its male DVD service Blockbuster also introduced something similar online with the DVD subscription service on its website they also rolled out something called game rush where you can rent video games and consoles this was also at the same time where they introduced game and DVD trading in store so as a few years past on Netflix I'd things were going pretty well in February of 2007 the company had delivered its billionth DVD and by at this time they were less of a rival the Blockbuster and more of a threat to them as this achievement for Netflix occurred the company began to introduce video on-demand online just as DVD sales began to decline as for blockbuster after their CEO was replaced by James Keyes in 2007 the company had decided to completely dissolve the online service blockbuster headset up previously and the new business strategy would focus 100% on physical retail which would turn out to be a fatal one for the company following this decision the company began establishing blu-ray DVDs and a good portion of the retail stores oddly enough in 2007 the company made a pretty odd offer to buy out the struggling Circuit City company blockbuster withdrew its offer in 2008 as analysts claimed that the company had a bold plan of turning around the dying company which was pretty ambitious considering blockbuster wasn't all that hot at the time either evidently later on that year Circuit City declared bankruptcy and ceased all operations a year later anyways as for blockbuster well it wasn't doing all that good actually it was terribly underperforming from the years previous and to put it bluntly it was dying and on the verge of death On February 10th 2010 blockbuster ceased all of its operations in Portugal closing 17 stores things got much much worse in March after an audit blockbuster issued a bankruptcy warning as the company was over a billion dollars in debt and as blockbusters boards of directors began to resign the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after stock prices fell under $1 a share on August 26 2010 news media began reporting that blockbuster was planning on filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy and in light of this news block was CFO resigned so with the company barely being able to sustain a working corporate system the company finally declared chapter 11 bankruptcy with the company having over 900 million dollars in debt following his bankruptcy they announced they would keep 3,000 stores open however in December they decided to go back on that and closed more stores in hope that this would allow them to find a feasible exit plan to their chapter 11 bankruptcy however the damage had been done and blockbuster was now valued at 300 million dollars worth of assets which would soon be liquidated once the company opts to chapter 7 bankruptcy chapter 11 bankruptcy means the company can kind of get out of it and sort of restructured the company much like Six Flags did before with chapter 7 bankruptcy that means basically they're going to liquidate all their assets to get as much money out of the company as possible however in March 2011 the Dish Network made a surprising move by purchasing all of blockbuster for a reported 360 million dollars even with the promise of keeping the majority of the stores open the promise was sort of broken when more and more stores continued to close in August of 2011 blockbuster began the liquidation and closure of all Canadian operations as the Dish Network absorbed the company the idea they had to make blockbuster into a Netflix competitor was eventually cancelled by the way Netflix revenue was nearing a billion dollars by this time so from that point on blockbuster really had sort of just faded off all of the retail stores in Mexico were converted to the B store and really all the rest of the stores in the United States have really just liquidated all their assets and closed all of those stores have either been repurposed or simply just left there completely abandoned since there was so many of them a good amount of stores still sit completely abandoned and not leased by anyone as of 2016 15 blockbuster stores remain in the world essentially they're just independent stores that are licensing the blockbuster name ironically before we made this video we were actually sent a picture of a blockbuster that still remains and we were just told not too long ago that that blockbuster is actually going at a business town so I guess it's 14 now 50 so is it really blockbusters fault that caused their outcome well kinda yeah I know a lot of people think that they were just stupid to pass up the purchase of Netflix and to be fair as we look at it now in the future it is kind of stupid but in their defense the company was doing very very well at the time and the impending shift to online wasn't that apparent plus the DVD sales at the time were massive and even if they did buy Netflix all they would have done is just get into the mailing DVD business earlier you got to remember Netflix at the time wasn't even considering online video all it was is just a DVD mailing service so if Blockbuster bought that all they would have done is just absorbed the mailing service into their company which Blockbuster already did a few years later another company like Hulu would have just came along with online video streaming and blockbuster probably would have seen a similar fate the thing is though when blockbuster decided to focus 100% on physical video rental as opposed to Netflix with their switch to online Blockbuster was just destined to fail at that point the fact of the matter is blockbuster was created to fit the demand of the time it was created in the physical VHS and DVD rentals only lasted until a better and more efficient way to watch media was created so what does the future hold for blockbuster well as of today blockbuster is now a name of the past like I said earlier only 15-14 stores now remain under the name blockbuster and really that number will continue decrease as the years go on I guess it's safe to say that blockbuster is just a relic of the past and a perfect example of a massive American corporation that was just too slow and fell behind emerging technologies even though blockbuster was kind of becoming a pretty sketchy place to go towards the end it was defining company of the 80s 90s and early 2000s and it really did popularize the video rental service in the country lots of people including myself grew up with blockbuster and I remember going there with my parents every weekend and getting the day after tomorrow yeah that's what I was into when I was a kid funny thing actually when my blockbuster left it ironically was immediately replaced by another video rental store and it's still there maybe one day nostalgically more stores will open under their name licensed but his online video becomes more popular and with DVDs becoming more obsolete the chances of that are kind of unlikely but in this case only time will tell anyway guys my name is Jake follow us on Instagram Twitter and snapchat and thank you very much the please hurry so many oh sit sir this is like the easy of lighted I can't do it for some reason since there was so old my god

Channel: Bright Sun Films

Views: 2,639,968

Keywords: history, Blocobuster, Blockbuster Video, video, Blockbuster Abandoned, abandoned, retro, abandoned store, last blockbuster, blockbuster store, bankruptcy, target, blockbuster bankruptcy, company fail, abandoned retail, bright sun films, amerian store, canadian store, blockbuster retro, blockbuster entertainment inc, blockbuster fail, store closing, closing, abandoned mall, abandoned company, exploring, andoned bright sun films, the dish, Cicut City, dallas, failed brand, urbex

Id: Q5Jc3_rnLYI

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2016