Who owns blockbuster

Subscriber Account active since. Irene Kim: At its peak in the late '90s, Blockbuster owned over 9, video-rental stores in the United States, employed 84, people worldwide, and had 65 million registered customers. So, what happened? Blockbuster was founded by David Cook, a software supplier in the oil and gas industry. After studying the potential of a video-store business for a friend, he realized that a well-franchised chain could grow to 1, units.

And so the first Blockbuster store opened in Dallas on October 19, Andy Ash: According to David Cook, the opening night of that first Blockbuster store was a huge success. The story goes that they actually had to lock the doors because of overcrowding. The thing that really set Blockbuster apart at that time was their huge range of titles. Other independent video stores could only keep track of or so movies. Blockbuster had an innovative new barcode system, which meant that they could track up to 10, VHSs per store to each registered customer, which also meant that they could keep an eye on those lucrative late fees.

Under Huizenga, Blockbuster embarked on an aggressive expansion plan, buying out existing video-rental chains while opening new stores at a rate of one per day. By , just three years after the first store opened, Blockbuster was America's No.

By , when Viacom took Blockbuster public, there were 6, Visiting a Blockbuster Video store had become an intrinsic experience the world over for movie lovers and non-movie lovers alike. The memories of those visits, the sights, sounds and smells common to every store, from the canvas of blue and yellow to the popcorn to the dust and plastic lining the shelves, help keep the Bend store busy today. A man interviewed for the documentary says he drove 15 hours from San Diego to visit the Oregon store.

Another man who traveled from Utah admires the inside of it with a childlike glow. Others lament the downfall of Blockbuster and how the progress of technology has created a better connection to entertainment and information — but not to each other. And I fall into the — we all fall into the — ease of it, that we can get everything anywhere. We can watch a movie and download it on our Apple TVs and do all of that.

But I still love the fact you can go somewhere. Despite the fact that fires had ravaged the same area three times earlier in the century, people continued to build homes there. Fires had previously Through the On October 19, , near the Belgian city of Ypres, Allied and German forces begin the first of what would be three battles to control the city and its advantageous positions on the north coast of Belgium during the First World War.

After the German advance through Belgium and Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. Great Britain. American Revolution. In April , two months after the men from Waste Management bought into Blockbust er, Cook left the company. Soon thereafter, the company's headquarter s were moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

By June , Blockbuster owned 15 stores and franchised 20 others. W ith this base, Huizenga set out to transform Blockbuster into the ind ustry's dominant player. He kept most of Cook's policies, such as sto re hours from a. Despite conventional wisdom that the videotape rental business was heavily dependent on hits, 70 percent of Blockbuster's rental revenues came from non-hit movies, which had the added benefit of being less expensive to purchase from distributo rs.

In addition, Blockbuster's management decided to eschew revenue f rom X-rated adult films, opting instead for a family environment. With these policies in place, Blockbuster set out on a program of agg ressive expansion. The company began to buy back franchised operation s with the goal of 60 percent company-owned Blockbuster outlets. In a ddition, Wayne Huizenga began to buy up chains of video stores that a lready dominated their local markets, using this as a shortcut to qui ck expansion.

Two months later, it purchased Movies T o Go, Inc. To support its expansion, Blockbuster established six regional office s, including a distribution center in Dallas that prepared tapes to b e placed in stores. By the end of , Blockbuster was operating stores and had become the country's fifth largest video chain in ter ms of revenue. Blockbuster continued its ambitious expansion program in In Mar ch, the company purchased Video Library, Inc. By November, this stake had risen to 20 percent. With stores, Blockbuster had beco me the largest video rental chain in the country.

At the end of the y ear, the company's number of stores had risen to It also purchased Oklahoma Entertainment, Inc. The following month brought the purchase of Vector Video, Inc. By June , two years after Huizenga's takeover, the company ran stores.

Sales had tripled, profits near ly quadrupled, and the value of the company's stock had risen seven-f old. Despite these gains, in April , Blockbuster's efforts to buy up o ther chains with stock suffered a setback when an analyst at a large stock brokerage issued a report condemning what he considered to be t he company's misleading accounting practices.

In calculating its earn ings, Blockbuster spread out the costs of purchasing video store chai ns and building new stores over a year period, and also spread out the cost of buying large numbers of hit tapes over three years, much longer than tapes retained their value.

In addition, the company rel ied on one-time-only franchise fees for 28 percent of its revenue. De spite this criticism, Blockbuster declined to change its accounting p ractices, and the company's stock price eventually regained its forme r level. In November , Blockbuster's largest shareholder, the United Artis ts Entertainment Company, announced that it would sell its 12 percent holding in the company, having previously sold its 28 franchised Blo ckbuster stores, in an effort to streamline its own business holdings.

Worries that the video rental industry was reaching a saturation po int cast doubts on Blockbuster's ability to keep opening stores indef initely.

One response to this concern was to look to markets outside the Unite d States for growth. Accordingly, original investor John Melk was dis patched to start up a British subsidiary, with the company's first fo reign store to be opened in South London called the Ritz. Blockbuster 's management continued to maintain that since the video "superstore" concept was open for anyone to copy, it needed to grab market share as fast as possible in order to exploit its ground-breaking concept.

Carrying out this philosophy, the company opened its 1,th store be fore the end of In addition, the company acceler ated foreign expansion, augmenting its operations in Britain and plan ning for operations in Australia and the rest of Western Europe. In t he United States, the chain had opened its 1,th store by June ; new outlets opened at a rate of one a day.

In October , Blockbuster announced plans to cooperate with Den Fu jita, the company that ran McDonald's franchises in Japan, in the dev elopment and franchising of video rental stores in that country. Although Blockbuster continued its strong pace of new store openings in , the slowing growth of the video rental industry was becoming evident. Even though the company's earnings grew an astronomical percent in , they contracted to a still-impressive 93 percent ra te of growth in , followed by a rate of 48 percent in