Renting your idea

Recently one of the stories being well discussed, written, pondered & argued is about NetFlix vs Blockbuster. You ever wonder what in the world those terms meant? If yes, then you are in the same position as mine few days back. Here goes, what they are and what they mean to you and me. Netflix and Blockbuster are online DVD rental service companies. I think, this must be barest introduction one can give. Anyways, I will pour more info on that, in coming lines. (check out the link, on their business model).

I have good number of feeds in my Google reader to spend a wonderful Sunday afternoon as a information miner, mining about 60 subscriptions. I recently went though couple of blogs and websites feeds using Google Reader, these companies (NetFlix and Blockbuster) often showed their presence for number of reasons in these sites. Check here, here and here for more gyana on what exactly going on.

To give you a snap shot of what is this all about, here goes my bodhana:

Netflix has been in DVD rental business for a long time. It has innovated a new way of doing rental business. Making the business completely online. Whats the big deal making a business to e-business one might ask? Here is the real difference Netflix had made. It introduced one of the coolest ways of renting DVDs online. It has vast range of DVD movies and offer customers number of plans like - keep the DVDs for any number of days and watch them as much as one wants. It made the model so simple that even a common person with enough common sense can copy the model and run his/her own DVD rental business. All the DVDs transported through postal service with no charge on customer side! Two DVDs (in some plan, unlimited DVDs) at a time! Free Delivery to home! No late fees! and with voice customer support too. One might expect it should be ruling the market. Guess what, it had ruled once, but not any more. It seems, it is having worst days in recent times and losing its customer base due to enormous competition by the relatively new player Blockbuster.

Ambani in making

By looking at these stories, I think DVD rental is a huge business in USA. If this statement is true, then there should good reservoir of market potential in India too. The tiger (Indian market for DVD rental) is in hibernation state now. It should be awakened and tapped. World, I started to think in these terms..... beware! ;)

So I thought to, up my sleeves and there came a sweet shocker. There are lot of companies in India doing online DVD rental business!. In fact, these companies long ago well established. This is what we call in economics as Opportunity Cost! I read it somewhere in one of the economic courses I had during my engineering. (See, how well I am informed. Actually the term should be "Opportunity Lost".)

Copy Cats

I went through couple of sites (Indian versions) - MovieMart & Seventymm, which are the same old stories. They have copied from the success stories of Netflix and Blockbuster. I could find the same mantra - Two DVDs at a time! Free Delivery! and No late fees! in their sites

Companies like Clixflix, serves its members through stores, the phone, sms and the Internet. Apart from this deviation, the story and model are very similar. There is no innovativeness and it is just "follow the leader" concept. Only inspirations and no creativity. Just being copy cats. See how simple to pin point someone and say things which you will be trying to say when other people have had already implemented your idea (or inspiration)!

Disclaimer:

All the information given in the post is theoretical experience only. That is, the information processed & digested, given in the links and other online sources only. Yet to subscribe to a online DVD rental service. :)