That’s Reed Hastings up above. He’s the CEO of Netflix, and the mastermind behind the Quickster debacle. Last month he apologetically announced that he was going to split Netflix into separate divisions: one for streaming videos, and the other for DVD-by-mail, to be called Quickster. After outrage from consumers and investors, he sheepishly backed out of that plan yesterday. Strange that Hastings thought the best way to phase out a service was to build another company. That’d be like McDonalds selling Big Macs in one location, and Quarter Pounders in another. Read more…

The above photo taken from The Onion isn’t too far off: Blockbuster is in dire straits. It’s hard to feel sorry for the massive video rental chain, though. They’re the monopoly that destroyed the market for independent retailers and censored hundreds of films. But now the company is getting desperate. According to Studio Briefing, Blockbuster is facing an astronomical third quarter loss of $116 million in revenue (it was only about $20 million at the same time a year ago) due to Read more…

I was bored the other night and started skimming through the Netflix “watch instantly” list to find something that could occupy my brain for about ninety minutes. This was no easy task. While I was not expecting to find a masterpiece, I was somewhat dismayed to see what a dumping ground the “watch instantly” section is for straight-to-video movies like Read more…