Rich Fiscus
10 Jan 2008 23:07
On Tuesday, at an event overshadowed by the annual Consumer Electronics Show in nearby Nevada, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes spoke about the company's plans for the coming year. Not surprisingly, those plans are primarily a continuation of the company's direction since Keyes took over last year.
Although lacking the glamour and media attention of CES, the Citigroup 2008 Global Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Phoenix was attended by media analysts, many of whom were in attendance for Keyes' presentation, where he laid out Blockbuster's plan to reshape themselves into “an entertainment convenience store.”
“If we can improve that core [DVD rental] business we believe it can generate incremental cash flow that can then be used to invest in the future, for digitial downloads, for technology, perhaps for kiosks,” he said.
Last year Blockbuster began testing kiosks in a number of locations, and is reportedly considering the possibility of both on-demand DVD burning and downloading video to flash memory as an intermediary format used to transport it to a home computer or portable music player. Eventually they may even be able to load media files directly on the consumer's iPod (or other player hardware).
Source: Video Business