Remember Blockbuster Video? I don’t mean its sad final days. I mean the days, nearly 30 years ago, when Blockbuster was a real destination by itself. You could find friends there, scouting for new releases. There were big events when high-profile movies were finally available. It was the place to be back in the days when MC Hammer told you not to touch this.
We all know what happened. Blockbuster died, and most folks believe it’s because they couldn’t keep up with technology. The lure of having DVDs sent to you and keeping them as long as you wanted overshadowed the idea of going to the video store. And then of course streaming changed the model forever. But is that what really happened?
Why Blockbuster really died
Blockbuster really died because they got so bad that you were actually willing to pay more money for less convenience. You were willing to wait for stuff to show up even though you could go down to the video store, get the movie today, and pay less to rent it than you paid for Netflix.
Why? Because Blockbuster became a mess. Chances are you couldn’t find that new movie, or anything you wanted. The in-store experience was a mess. Blockbuster was too involved in trying to get you to watch what they had to sell you instead of getting the content you wanted to watch. Their tech stunk too. Paper cards with faded bar codes? Yes that’s where we were at. They largely ignored every improvement in tech as it happened, and eventually they paid the price.
Emblematic of all of Blockbuster’s failures at the same time was its “new releases” wall. Here you would find movies from the last two years, but never the movie you actually wanted to see from last month. That movie was held back for months while the studios tried to sell you copies instead of renting them.
Here’s why I’m talking about this on Streaming Saturday.
So, I’ve told you why Blockbuster died. Now let’s talk about Max. Yes, I’m trashing them again.
Let’s run this down point by point, shall we?
“Chances are you couldn’t find that new movie, or anything you wanted.”
Max is a bewildering mess of content without any real understanding of what the Max brand stands for. There are about seven ways to filter things, all in different places, and you still can’t find what you’re looking for.
“Their tech stunk too.”
After months, I still have issues with Dolby Vision and frame rates in the Max app. They’re a lot better, but they’re still there. The biggest problem I have is that as I scroll down a long list, the list will randomly scroll back to the top for no reason. It makes going through that long list incredibly painful.
“…its new releases wall”
Have you noticed that Max has completely given up on the idea that a “new release” is something that’s actually new? OK, so, writer’s strike and the like. There’s not as much new content out there. But Max’s new releases are often movies and shows that have been out for a year, were hawked to the highest bidder instead of staying on Max, and have just come back.
There’s also the more modestly named “Just added” which can have content from anytime in the last 100 years, to be honest. But at least they’re not calling it new.
Max isn’t the only app with this problem…
Yes, I would say that Netflix and Hulu suffer from some of this as well. But Max stands as the worst of the incredibly high-priced tier of streaming services. And their prices stand to go up even higher, I’m sure.
Here’s the funny thing. Not that I’m so bullish on Netflix, but they do seem to do things “just better enough.” Yes, Netflix is a bewildering mess of content without any real attempt at creating a brand. But in that regard it’s kind of like Costco. You go in there knowing that there’s a lot of stuff and you will probably find something you didn’t know you wanted.
In contrast, Max is more like Costco after a hurricane hits it. (Personal experience here: I’ve actually seen one of these in real life, back in the 1990s.) You walk in, and there’s stuff everywhere. Some of it’s broken, some of it’s in the wrong place. If you’re lucky you can find something but you feel a little sense of misery for what the place used to look like before calamity (aka David Zaslav) came around.
In a very real way, I hope Max gets its act together. I hope it returns to being a premier destination for 100 years of Warner and Turner content. For my money, the Discovery stuff can all go away if it helps keep costs down. I hope that the company brings in a team of top programmers to fix the rest of the bugs and stops trying to reinvent things that worked perfectly last year. Maybe then, I’d feel a tiny bit more comfortable with a price increase. Keep things the way they are, though, and my Max password will probably get as much use as my old Blockbuster video card.
