Blockbuster gets kicked when it’s down by cable companies
It’s a tough time to be a video rental store owner wherever you are, but it’s especially tough if you’re Blockbuster Inc and have 6,500 stores to manage, thousands of employees, expensive debt repayments and a sinking share price.
Yesterday Blockbuster warned for the first time that it may need to file for bankruptcy protection and its auditors at Pricewaterhouse raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern.
It doesn’t get any worse than that right? No, it does.
According to a story we spotted today from Hollywood Reporter, movie studios and cable companies are joining forces for a $30 million advertising campaign over the coming months to promote awareness of movies available on cable’s video on demand services.
From Hollywood Reporter:
The Movies on Demand initiative comes as on-demand film rentals have hit new highs as viewing habits are changing, and studios are increasingly looking to capitalize on their high margins amid a more mature DVD market.
The TV, print and online ad campaign runs under the theme “The Video Store Just Moved In” and highlights how easy it is for digital cable subscribers to view movies at home with a simple click of their remote. It also includes a dedicated website at CableVideoStore.com and a Movies on Demand logo.
The Hollywood Reporter, redesigned
The Hollywood Reporter is joining the ranks of newspapers and magazines that are redesigning their print editions and Web sites, but the changes that the nearly 80-year-old publication is making will affect much more than the way it presents itself.
Monday’s official relaunch of one of the top trades covering the movie business also will feature more charts, more data and more of a business focus in its reporting, publisher Eric Mika told us in an interview late last week.
“The industry is the largest exporting product America has. It’s not a frivolous business,” Mika said. “None of the publications to date really represent that. … It reaches out to the finance community, the technology community, but it does not forget the core readership on Wilshire Blvd., New York City and London.”
Elizabeth Guider , editor of the Reporter, said the plan is to continue offering stories about casting and deals — what she called the “bread and butter of Hollywood” — but the new mandate in an era of cheap information is to offer readers more analytical coverage with quick turnaround. That’s a similar aim for news outlets from The Wall Street Journal to our own news service , and a familiar proposal for a way to figure out how to charge people for news when so much of it is free these days.
Speaking of free, the Reporter’s parent company, Nielsen, plans eventually to make some of that information available online for a fee.
“Once we have enough real exclusive data … that sort of area will go behind the wall,” said Mika. “What is exclusive data? Data that only we can obtain, analyze and develop.”
Here are some of the changes coming to the print edition:
I worked for a locally owned video rental store (6 locations) in 2008. It’s numbers each month were hand over fist higher than 2007. I still stop in occasionally, and my former manager assures me that buisness is still going up.
Perhaps it’s just blockbuster that sucks?