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Buy or rent – goodbye to my date with Blockbuster

Posted in Media, Mel Varley May 10th, 2007 by Melinda Varley

Last week Tiscali jumped on the video-on-demand (VOD) band wagon launching its very own service to rival the likes of Channel 4, BT Vision and ITV. But what will make Tiscali’s so different and is this the official end to Blockbuster and other video and DVD rental shops?
 

VOD services are the future and we can expect some fierce competition ahead in terms of ad-funding and marketing plans. A service such as Tiscali is already well targeted as the 18 per cent of broadband customers who currently have Tiscali broadband services in their homes will have the VOD service ready to go.

Good thing to stick to what you’re good at, if you’re already online that your market is set. But what about Channel 4? 4OD has the advantage of being able to continually advertise on TV – the mass market. However, 4OD is a different set-up, its more of a catch-up service than it is a movie service.

The most interesting competitor to Tiscali is by far BT Vision – we’re just waiting for them to get their act together an actually launch it to the masses. They advertise it enough and put on a fancy press show last year, but still we see no results. So why wait?

Why wait in a queue (even though Britons love queuing) at your local Blockbuster on a Friday night when you can click a button on your PC and have a movie from just 99p?

Older generations surely won’t go for this and as laptops become the norm in most homes and continue to get smaller and smaller maybe this isn’t the end just yet for Blockbuster as many experts believe the success of the services will depend on people being able to watch the films on their TVs rather than their PCs.

For example, I am wanting to rent out A Good Year, I’ve been waiting ages for it but unfortunately Tiscali doesn’t have it available. However, Blockbuster does for just £3.99. Plus if I go down to Blockbuster I can also pick up some ice cream and pop corn. Now that’s a movie experience.

If we give VOD a few more months though we will see the ad-funded model become more popular, such as in LOVEFiLM, and eventually our choices will maximise and movie will become cheaper. But for now, Blockbuster still has time to come up with something other than giving us our DVDs through the post in order to compete with a movie world that is building itself on convenience.