Blockbuster, the movie rental service on its way to bankruptcy has been saved from the jaws of death. Dish Network has just announced that they will be acquiring the movie rental chain for $228 million. While this saves Blockbuster from disappearing off the face of the earth, Dish hasn’t mentioned what its plans are for Blockbuster but they have mentioned that there will be significant challenges as they plan to re-establish Blockbuster’s brand as a leader in video entertainment. Blockbuster was one of the remaining large movie rental services that relied solely on renting out DVDs instead of upgrading with the times and moving to a video stream based service. By the time it stopped becoming profitable, it was too late for the company and last September, they filed for bankruptcy. It’ll be interesting to see what Dish does with their newly acquired company. Turn it into a viable competitor to Netflix? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
