Ars Technica Likes the Blockbuster/Circuit City Buyout

Hmm, it seems that they are on board this strangest of buyouts.

From a consumer's point of view, we'd get movies and video games for sale or rent right next to a wide selection of the gadgets we'd need for playing them, followed by snacks and finger foods by the checkout counter. It's all about convenience and one-stop shopping, and I really think the concept could work. Convenience is still king, right?

I still have to disagree though. Most of the gadgets you need for playing the rented and bought DVDs/games are not quick one-off purchases. A Blue-Ray player is a good $400 and a HDTV is like $1000 or more. These aren't quicky impulse purchases like finger food or DVDs. They are something that a consumer puts a decent amount of thought into buying.

I could see a person perhaps buying a Blue-Ray player and then renting a few movies to watch on it at the same time. But would it be worth the mammoth amount of expense it would take to meld their two inventory systems together? It would give Blockbuster an excuse to close hundreds of stores by moving them into existing Circuit City's. That could save some money in the short term.

I'm also not sure about all this talk of the media convergence where the content and the device are connected somehow. I can only see something like this happening if Blockbuster sells DVRs or DVD players out of their Circuit City's preloaded with a video on demand service built into the device. It would kind of be like a TiVo preloaded with a connection to the Blockbuster Video on Demand Store.

A Blockbuster branded DVR would indeed be game changer if they could deliver HD movies quickly and easily to the home in some other way then via snail mail or by picking them up at the physical store. Maybe BlockBuster could create a version of BitTorrent optimized for downloading HD content which works by storing pieces of those giant files on 1000s of individual DVR devices installed into peoples homes.

So the service would work by having you pay a monthly fee of like $19.95 and then you buy the hardware for like $300 and hook it up to your broadband connection and away you go. You then would have all the HD content that you could watch on an HD-TV that you bought at Circuit City. This TV would be connected to a Blockbuster branded DVR that uses this BlockBuster BitTorrent Service. If they pull that off then you might be looking at the next Apple. Or the merged companies could fail miserably and go bankrupt. Which would make Netflix the last service standing.