People Get IT!
It’s now wednesday night, quiet, time to take a breather and recap!
It’s drizzling outside, Macy Gray is playing on the stereo, I’m sitting in my featherstone (a.k.a. groovy chair) with laptop by the window, last rentals went out about 10 minutes ago (thanks Ben and Dave). Fantales are all gone but still chomping on jaffas!
The beauty of a full web system - content management, POS, storefront, reporting - is that I can do it from anywhere!! APPLEBOX can be fully administered from Bean Counter, across the road. Could even whack some storage in there, hold some discs, config the system and be up and running with another store in under an hour.
But I digress - People GET IT!!
3 years ago, when I started talking about this idea, I mostly got glassy eyed looks from people. Yawn. I’m happy with my local store. What about Video On Demand? So why hasn’t it been done before? Blockbuster will crush you. Isn’t this just Quickflix? But now every single person who walks into this store gets it. Their reactions vary from the mild ‘Of course - this makes perfect sense’ to ‘WOW’ and ‘This is the best idea I’ve seen for ages’. It’s early days of course, but these reactions are fantastic.
The problem with pitching this idea is that most people think they are happy with their local video store. They don’t recognise there is a problem - the status quo has been maintained for 15 years. What’s more, people think the logical evolution is Video On Demand, and it’s just around the corner. APPLEBOX technology isn’t revolutionary, the market is mature (and declining), the next step seems to be enshrined in stone.
But - when you step foot inside our store, it all makes perfect sense. The barnyard expanse of Video Ezy is gone. The flouro lighting is gone. The gray melamine shelving, the thousands of covers blankly staring at you are gone. Instead, a small cozy space, 20 inch monitors with high res cover art, intelligent search & browse, your own account with favourites already picked. Absolute ease in finding a movie, and convenience because you can take the entire catalogue with you and do it all from home.
Video on Demand isn’t here yet. And whilst we definitely want to be part of the VOD future we aim to strike a balance between being part of that future, and taking pragmatic steps to get there. This is our first step toward that future - but even so, I suspect the humble DVD store will be around for a long time to come ….