In the long, drawn-out saga of Blockbuster Canada’s demise, today marks a grim day for the national movie rental chain: already under a court-ordered receivership, the company is set to shut down all of its few remaining operations. Blockbuster’s folding isn’t just the work of YouTube, Netflix and piracy (we’re pretty sure that the worldwide recession did a lot of the heavy lifting), but it is a fairly impressive sign of how the film market is changing. HMV, for one, is downsizing, including the store at Yonge and Dundas, YouTube Canada just announced it will start renting movies and, in general, the movie retail industry doesn’t look much in 2011 like it did in 2001. Read the entire story [CBC] »
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Finding no buyers for its last few stores, Blockbuster concedes an inevitable, crushing defeat
Blockbuster death spiral: Canadian stores can’t escape the Netflix effect
Blockbuster Canada is now in receivorship (Image: Jonathan Swafford)
Though we’ve been hearing for months that the Canadian arm of bankrupt U.S. movie rental giant Blockbuster Video has been doing just fine, it was put into receivership by court order yesterday. Apparently, despite the fact that the Canadian branch is still a functioning business, the assets are being shut down and sold off to pay back the American company’s creditors. Of course, there’s but one competitor to blame: big, bad and oh-so-wonderful Netflix.
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Blockbuster’s belly up: least surprising bankruptcy since David Crosby
(Image: travdir)
On the heels of this week’s Netflix launch in Canada—with a pretty major PR snafu—comes the news that Blockbuster Video (one of Netflix’s biggest U.S. rivals) is filing for bankruptcy protection. South of the border, the once-ubiquitous blue-signed video rental stores have been steadily losing business to services like Netflix, while the less legally inclined have been turning to the Internet to download movies. Here in Canada, Netflix has been less of a factor, but there’s more than one shuttered Blockbuster outlet in Toronto. The company says its international stores are doing fine (outside of Argentina), but it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall. How did Blockbuster come to this?
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