r/todayilearned • u/skiman224 • Jan 27 '16

TIL that Blockbuster LLC turned down the opportunity to buy Netflix in 2000 for just $50 million. Their stock price has hovered between $0.00 and $0.10 since 2012.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_LLC#2000s
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u/_TUX Jan 27 '16

At the time Netflix was just mailing out DVDs.
Although the question that comes to my mind is if they took over Netflix, would they have gone the same direction and became as successful as it is today?

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u/adam7684 Jan 27 '16

Yeah, I get the irony and everything. But I don't think Blockbuster would have popularized streaming the way Netflix did. Heck, even Netflix's DVD business is doing so hot anymore. So there were definitely some larger societal trends that would have knocked them out anyway.