Saturday, August 24, 2019

"Epic Fail: How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix" (NFLX; BBI)

From Variety, Nov. 12, 2013:

Blockbuster chiefs lacked the vision to see how the industry was shifting under the video rental chain's feet

It will go down as one of the biggest missed opportunities in the boardroom: Blockbuster deciding not to buy Netflix.

But that’s what could have happened multiple times throughout the early 2000s when Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings courted a deal with Blockbuster-chief John Antioco to purchase the then DVD-by-mail rental company for $50 million (the company now has a market cap of $19.7 billion).

In 2005, Variety first reported that while Antioco was respected as a tough negotiator and strong manager, he lacked the vision to see where the homevideo industry was going and the changing shifts in the business under his feet.

“But management and vision are two separate things,” said a former high-ranking Blockbuster exec at the time, recalling, “We had the option to buy Netflix for $50 million and we didn’t do it. They were losing money. They came around a few times.”

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.”

Blockbuster would pursue other ventures. In 2000, it inked a 20-year-exclusive video-on-demand pact with Enron Broadband Services as the energy conglom launched into telecom. Blockbuster canned the pact after nine months after Enron was mired in scandal....
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