July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With streaming media websites like Netflix and iTunes virtually wiping out Main Street’s DVD rental stores, Dish Network has found an alternative use for Blockbuster, the chain it acquired last year.

Blockbuster revealed today that it will begin stocking mobile phones, as well as DVDs, in its brick-and-mortar stores around the country. The phones are already available for purchase online.

Is it just me, or are Blockbuster store sightings more difficult to scout out than a Spotted Owl? Dish has already closed about half of the 1,700 Blockbuster stores it acquired when it bought the company out of bankruptcy.

For Dish, the announcement is a long-time coming. Executives announced their intention to sell mobile phones from Blockbuster stores when the acquisition was finalized in April, 2011.

Dish reportedly plans to begin selling mobile phones out of stores under the name “Blockbuster Mobile.” Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile and other carriers have already signed on as partners. According to Bloomberg, the move may be a prelude to Dish launching its own mobile phone service — it is already looking for potential partners.

Dish recently acquired numerous wireless airwaves, and is awaiting word from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about how it can use them.

Mobile phone image // violetkaipa, Shutterstock

Satellite television provider Dish Network recently admitted that it may have been a bit shortsighted in its plans to transform video rental chain Blockbuster into a serious Netflix competitor.

“You make a lot of mistakes in business,” said Dish Network founder and Chairman Charlie Ergen in an interview with Bloomberg. “I don’t think Blockbuster is going to be a mistake, but it’s unclear if that’s going to be a transformative decision.”

Dish purchased Blockbuster for $320 million in April 2011 after the company filed for bankruptcy. The TV provider expected to grow subscriptions to its primary satellite business by bundling a Blockbuster streaming video and DVD-by-mail service together. And while that strategy seems to have worked, Dish’s other expectations of rivaling Netflix fell short.

Unlike Netflix, Blockbuster was supposed to act as a sort of Redbox-like drop-off point that meant customers didn’t have to wait for the mailman in order to swap out movies. In reality, the retail stores couldn’t make enough money to justify staying open. Part of that had to do with Dish not being approved to build its own high-speed wireless network — as well as a line of products to run on that network, which would have been in Blockbuster stores.

Ergen said Dish has no plans to continue pushing Blockbuster as a Netflix competitor in the future. Instead, the company is looking at building a new web TV-based subscription service that would give people only a handful of popular cable channels at a fraction of the price they pay for traditional cable/satellite TV. Ergen, however, says it could be years before these plans come to pass.

Blockbuster is far from the only problem the tenacious satellite TV provider is facing these days. Dish is also locking legal horns with many of the major broadcast TV networks over its Hopper DVR technology, which allows subscribers to auto-skip commercials instead of just hitting the fast-forward button on recorded programs.

More recently, Gannet’s broadcasting Arm threatened to yank its channels from Dish if it didn’t stop using Hopper. Reuters reports that Dish offered to pay Gannett 200 percent more to renew its licensing agreement before it ends on Sunday, an offer Gannett has declined thus far.

Photo via trebomb/Flickr

But a decade ago, the big social networking story was Friendster with a whopping 3 million users. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had 95 percent market share. And less than 600 million people were online globally … fewer than Facebook users alone in 2012.

10 years, 3,652 days, 87,648 hours.

A lot has changed since Apple was touting a new 700 MHz iBook and iPhoto 1.1. Blockbuster went from $5.5 billion in revenue to a big bloody hole in the ground, and Yahoo went from Internet behemoth to will-Marissa-Mayer-be-able-save-it.

In a glorious animated GIF from BestedSites: The change a decade makes in Internet time.

photo credit: Mikey G Ottawa via photo pin cc

Dish, which immediately closed 10 percent of all Blockbuster video-rental stores but kept 90 percent of its employees, confirmed Thursday that unprofitable stores would be shuttered.

“We are committed to keeping the profitable stores open that are generating positive cash flow, but there are ones that aren’t going to make it,” Dish Network Chief Executive Joe Clayton told Reuters.

When Dish purchased the crumbling company in a bankruptcy auction last year for $320 million, one of its many goals was to offer a la carte cable —a  service that would allow subscribers to stream cable channels directly to their computer. With the on-sight of less than profitable stores across the country, Clayton confirmed that those stores that stayed open will begin selling Dish subscriptions and possibly offer customer support in the future.

“If a consumer has a problem, just bring your box in and we’ll give you a new one so you don’t have to stay at home and wait for an installation,” he said to Reuters.

How many stores the company plans to close has not been released, although spokesman Marc Lumpkin confirmed that decisions will be made on a “case by case” basis.

Photo via trebomb/Flickr

The bundle will cost $40 and include some goodies for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. It’s a good way to introduce new gamers to the series. BioWare recently began giving away free copies of Mass Effect 2, another triple-A title, alongside sales of its Dragon Age 2 game. Both games will be cheaper than the original $60 price tag they had, so it should be more appealing to gamers.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves won numerous awards as the best game of the year in 2009. This demo shows that the Naughty Dog team that made the game for the PlayStation 3 wants to push the envelope even more with the newest game, which comes out this fall. If they succeed, then they could easily have game-of-the-year material again. And that would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Sony.

Independent studios with smaller budgets are often forced to come up with clever ideas and game mechanics to create popular and innovative titles. Studios like Naughty Dog — with titanic budgets and teams surpassing 200 people — work to create more cinematic experiences that stretch the limits of the gaming console and what games can offer gamers. It’s one of two ways the industry is pushing the envelope with video games.

It looks like Naughty Dog is trying to focus more on dynamic environments in the third version of its game. The company recently showed off a new level that takes place on a boat that sways constantly in a storm and has a lot of moving objects. At the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, Naughty Dog also demoed a 3D-enhanced level that had Drake escaping from a multi-story château that was burning and collapsing.

Uncharted 2 featured a level where players were running along a moving train that was riding through the jungle. Just about every part of the scene was constantly moving and the game didn’t slow down at any point. The château scene featured loads of fire and falling pieces of wood as the house crumbled around the hero Nathan Drake and his partner Sullivan.

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