Roku rocks! Buh-bye, Blockbuster

Our local Blockbuster raised the rental price for family movies from $1 to $5. That finally gave me the kick in the butt I needed to join the 21^st Century.

Our friends have long raved about streaming Netflix, either using a Roku box or more recently through video game consoles like Wii. We don’t have a gaming system and our wireless network signal was pretty weak near our television, though, so I just kept renting from Blockbuster.

Until Blockbuster made renting ridiculous by charging about half of what some of these movies would cost to buy. So I spent a few bucks to boost our signal and $80 more on a Roku. Because we already have a Netflix subscription, we now have instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows for free. The Roku was dead easy to set up and link to Netflix, and the selection is spectacular—so much so I’m kicking myself for not doing it earlier.

I’m also taking a moment to savor the irony here. Blockbuster was once a hugely successful company that dominated its sector but it failed to see the Next Big Thing—Netflix’s DVD mail service, which made renting movies a lot more convenient and less annoying (no late fees). Now that DVDs themselves are being made obsolete by video streaming, the smart thing to do would be to make DVD rentals really cheap for late adopters like me—but Blockbuster instead raised its rental fees and tightened its late-fee policies. Blockbuster is forcibly pushing its last remaining customers away, in essence speeding up its own obsolescence.

The lesson I’ll take away from this is that success is never permanent. If we don’t keep looking over the horizon, What’s Next is likely to run us over. And oh, yes, another good take-away: Don’t piss off your customers. Even the slow-to-learn ones will eventually go away.