Information Technology for Business Innovation Essay

Information Technology for Business Innovation - Essay Example As far as technology is concerned, there have been great advances in the movie industry and any company needs to stay abreast with these technologies in order to thrive. Blockbuster has, as stated earlier, used such technologies as streaming video on demand, kiosks and DVD-by-mail to distribute it products. There are various technologies that the company has put in place to ensure that it reaches its global customers as far as marketing and distribution are concerned. To start with, the company offers DVDs on a mail platform whereby movies are send to the consumers on request by mail and on a rental basis. For this technology, consumers request for movies of their preference or the ones they wish to rent and put them in a queue. The company then sends the ordered movies as soon as they become available. The movies are actually send in a postage paid envelope and come with a postage paid return envelope so what the consumers do is to watch the movies, put them into the accompanied pos tage paid envelopes and drop them in them mail then wait for their next ordered movie to be delivered. The only disadvantage of this technology is that customers can not be able to exchange the movies immediately after they watch them. Due to the fact that its customers are distributed globally, another disadvantage may be the high cost of delivery as compared to online method (Hayes 2005). Secondly, the company uses an online streaming technology whereby customers log on to the service which is based on a pay as you access plan then they can access movies of their tastes. As if this is not enough, the company offers free movies on a trial basis or after activating the media players then afterwards one has to pay to watch the subsequent movies. In 2003, blockbuster eventually launched their rental subscription program which allowed members to rent an unlimited number of movies during the duration of their subscription without the worry of any late fees. Basically, majority of the mo vies cost from $2.00 to $ 3.00. Examples of the online streaming services offered by blockbuster include; Vudu and Amazon on demand. It also has contracts with some movie distributors in order to receive movies quickly than the Netflix or their other competitors, Redbox; this betters its customers since it has locations globally. It also strongly emphasizes on new releases which means that their customers always receive the latest products in the market. The company also offers Blu-ray disks which offer advanced features like high definition and storage capacity as compared to DVDs. Has Blockbusters approach been successful? Although blockbuster tried to offer all its services at a friendly manner such as free movies on trial basis and home delivery of their products, it has still not been that successful. This is because it is faced by a lot of competition from its competitors such as the Netflix, movie gallery, and Hasting Entertainment and Red box. When it comes to online streami ng for example, a company like Netflix out did Blockbuster by the fact that its payment plan was friendlier than that of Blockbuster. To be more precise, the company (Netflix) offers unlimited online streaming at the cost of $7.99 per month which is reasonable far much cheaper than Blockbuster’s $ 2.00 to $ 3.00 for every movie. The deal offered by Netflix is even made better