AHC: Keep Blockbuster Alive in 2018

I don’t like the fact that I can’t fast forward through the FBI warning, and sometimes not even through the damn commercials.

Fair enough; it's been a couple years since I've actually watched a DVD. Lighter, easier to use, vastly better picture, though.
 
Hollywood learns nothing from the music industry and spends as much time/effort going after music pirates and trying to stop digital downloads/streaming. This gets you a blockbuster that's in slow decline, with obvious death by the middle of next decade but is still going with 500-1000 stores in 2018.
 
And I wonder if a more customer-driven model could develop, even if by accident.

For example, Blockbuster, Netflix, as well as a handful of others have streaming on demand. And “exclusive” content is not so much the norm in business relations.
 
I remember reading about a Blockbuster/Enron download box that you would order the video, it would download overnight and then you watch it the next day. Keep that idea and have the same box but as internet speeds got faster, the download was quicker then on to streaming.
 
Another idea, focus on franchising as many of the stores as possible, to give local store managers/owners as much freedom to operate as possible, provided they follow certain guidelines.
 
One way to do this would be to have Internet providers milk their regional monopolies more and charge much more for higher prices. If most of the country has rural Alaska-level internet then that should be enough to kill off streaming, and Blockbuster probably would be doing fine in those towns if they were bigger (it was enough to keep Blockbuster alive in Anchorage until a few months ago and that's in the urban areas with much higher speeds). It would probably relegate the US to being a second world country and destroy much of its economic competitiveness (and its ability to afford its military), but that's the price to keep Blockbuster alive and well.

That, or get rid of Net Neutrality earlier (or don't have it be created in the first place) and then have them block all streaming sites in favor of some cable company-specific clunky system that's worse than Blockbuster.
 
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