I was just looking through our Press collection of posts, and noticed that I never posted about one of our best events - Park(ing) Day, 2008. It’s now a couple of years old, but I still found the article in the Northcote Leader - have a look:

What a lot of work! I believe those lawn segments found a home as well.

The video store isn’t dying .. it’s just evolving

That’s from ‘New Recipes for Couch Potatoes’, Sun 21/11, in the Age’s ‘Living By Design’ lift out magazine. Glossy stock too! Click here to see a scanned copy.

Whilst we might not have got a mention by A Current Affair, The Age at least knows where its at.

Many thanks to Adam Turner for the mention.

Paul Uniacke of Blockbuster:

What does Telstra know about movies? .. what does Playstation know about movies? Blockbuster has been in the movie space for over 20 years …

Last week A Current Affair ran it’s once yearly infotainment special on the end of the video store. You can watch it here. Oovie took the spotlight as the latest challenger (pushing dispensing kiosks), with Redroom DVD much of the same. Quickflix get a mention and a raft of download options were given some time (t-box, appletv, fetchtv, sony playstation). A couple of omissions from their lineup - Bigpondmovies and x-box?

Paul Uniacke of FEG (Blockbuster/VideoEzy/EzyDVD) was given the last word. Walking around his showpiece store .. wow, does it look dated! Everyone can pick a service that suits them best, but the one thing that stands out against the modern challengers, is that Blockbuster really hasn’t changed in 20 years. That’s not all bad .. it gives great comfort to people who hate change. We’re conditioned to walking around shelves, and when I step inside an old school store, instinctively I flip into browse mode and begin that familiar old shuffle. Beyond the hype, old school rental still accounts for over 90% of Australia’s rental spend.

As for Paul’s belief that history/legacy gives him the advantage? Hmmm, perhaps not. I think I hear the echo of Nokia before Apple sat up and ruined their party.

Ok .. this is old news now.

Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the US on 23rd of September. Why? Because Blockbuster owed it’s debtors around 1 billion dollars. Yes that’s 1 billion. With the heyday of the local video store past, the industry rationalising, and a need to invest significantly to become a credible competitor to Netflix (in both mail-order and streaming capacities), Blockbuster found it’s debt too much, too crippling. They would never be able to repay it. If they closed shop - debtors and shareholders would lose everything, and Blockbuster would never have the chance to re-invent itself.

Filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy means that, as mediated by the US Bankruptcy court, debtors, shareholders and current management work out a way for all to go forward. With Blockbuster, debtors wrote down $900 million of their debt, basically assumed ownership, and Blockbuster survives to keep trading. They’re closing their non performing stores, will still run their strong stores, and continue with their kiosk/mail-order/streaming multi-channel strategy.

What a second chance! Now with only $100 million of debt, Blockbuster has a chance to re-construct itself. We’ll be watching to see how they go. As for Australia, Blockbuster is owned by the Franchise Entertainment Group, who run it alongside Video Ezy and EzyDVD. Here, we’re a fair way behind the massive rationalisation of local rental that has occurred in the states. The kiosk industry (RedroomDVD, Oovie) and mail order (Bigpondmovies and Quickflix) just haven’t been able to put the squeeze on local rental like their respective originators did in the US. Time will tell how it all plays out.

Finally we are at peace with the newest (now not so new) browser kids on the block - Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari! Go on .. hit applebox.com.au with Chrome and click ‘Browse DVDs’.

Admittedly we’ve been slow in bringing support to these browsers .. partially because until recently they’ve been a minority offering, but mainly because our business is still local retail - we rely on pickup. So .. for those not happy to install Firefox at home, we’ve gone to great expense to create a beautiful space for you to come down and browse from. We get about 55% of people doing everything in our store, while the remaining 45% reserve from home and drop through for a quick pickup.

But, the requests for Chrome/Safari support have risen and there comes a time that action is required! Plus - Safari and Chrome are such damn fine browsers now, they make our catalogue fly.

The sad thing is .. with Safari support we don’t automatically get access to iPhones and iPads. Our catalogue fires up, but on mobile Safari, Apple have disabled overflow scrollbars for divs and iframes, which means that even though our catalogue will open on both iPhone and iPad, you can’t scroll down the window of titles (and you won’t get far at all with the iPhone).

Yes I know, our catalogue doesn’t work with Safari. When I began developing the ‘box (6 years ago now .. yikes that’s hard to believe) Safari was just awful. Hard to debug, poor support for the latest in web tech. So I blocked it out, blocked my ears. Now of course, Safari rocks. Firefox rocks, Chrome rocks, and IE9 will finally .. hopefully make IE rock for the first time. So .. I’ve got my eye on it, and hope to get Safari and Chrome up and running in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, with a developer trick, you can get us up and running with Safari now.

Go to your preferences area click ‘Show Develop in menu bar’ in the advanced tab to make the developer’s menu appear. Select Develop -> User Agent -> Firefox 3.6.3 (Mac or Windows) to spoof the User Agent and make APPLEBOX think it’s Firefox. Boom! Click browse DVDs and you’re away. There are a few minor layout issues I’ve got to deal with .. but if Safari is your thing, go for it.

Safari 5 is absolutely smokin’ but Firefox is still my favourite .. it might be lagging Safari a bit in raw performance at the moment .. but Firefox 4 is due at the end of the year and all is lookin’ good.

Happy Christmas all! Take a 5 minute break, chillax and read our newsletter here.

It’s 12.30am and here I am … playing around with fonts. That’s Rockwell in the post title, Myriad Pro in the text. Not sure how many people will actually see those, or what they fall back to. Ok … back to work.

A quick tip for anyone looking for organic meat around our fair store .. drive the 5 or 6kms to Thornbury to Belmore Biodynamic Meat. I spoke to the guy standing proudly on the front page of their website. You’ll find them here. The last year or so has taken it’s toll .. long hours, poor diet, lack of exercise = 5 kilos extra thank you very much. Enough! Bought a Breville mega juicer that is just outstanding, and am going organic as much as possible now. That brings me to Belmore which is a revelation. I bought a biodynamic eye fillet this morning for around the same price a non-organic cut would cost me at Leo’s. Brilliant. With organic fruit and veg deliveries now once a week, I’m all set!

Our Blu-ray collection here at APPLEBOX is continuing to grow .. 104 titles and counting .. and I’m working my way through all of them. Blu-ray is the best format to watch movies in. Period. Dramas, Action, Sci-Fi, Classics… no format is better suited. Frost/Nixon is a stunning transfer that shows how good a character driven drama can look. 2001 is equally stunning to see how a 40 year old print can be remastered and shown in the full glory it deserves. Ditto for Casablanca. Don’t take my word for it .. Ridley Scott sums it up well.

The stats say Blu-ray penetration is growing at a slightly faster pace than DVD did, almost 4 years in. Which is great news. Prices are coming down .. you can get a Kogan for $269 and Aldi have one going at $199. We’ve of course got a Sony BDP-S350 to rent here if you want to give it a shot without the upfront expense. JB is doing the BDP-S350 for $300 and we’ve also got a deal with the local retravision .. grab our Hi-Def primer in-store for all the details!

Really, if you’ve got a HD TV, do yourself a favour and buy a Blu-ray player .. you’ll never look back.