Movie Rent

As Blockbuster tries to catch up with it's main competition, Netflix. It is making it even easier to rent movies online.

In 2004, Blockbuster started offering customers its own service for online movie rentals. Before that, to rent movies online could only be done through Netflix who was doing much better than bricks and mortar type rental stores.

For example, Hollywood Video, which was once considered a leader in the industry, has seen it's business go down since online movie rentals came along.

Lucky for Blockbuster, they were able to adapt to the changing landscape of the online movie rental business fast enough to stay in business.

What does Blockbuster offer that the others don't? Today, it's Netflix that has to do some catching up to Blockbuster. Blockbuster customers can rent on Blu-Ray at no extra cost. Netflix charges extra for this benefit.

The other major advantage Blockbuster has over Netflix is its brick-and-mortar stores. While traditional retail outlets seemed at first to be an old-fashioned handicap for people looking for movies to rent, today Blockbuster markets their stores as an added perk that Netflix doesn't have.

And it's true: with 7,000 stores in 21 countries, Blockbuster makes it easy to return movies locally.