Shareholders like VCs generally want growth and even if Redbox could gobble up Netflix's DVD rental market share, the market itself is stagnant if not shrinking at this point so a short-lived growth opportunity is not particularly appealing. Redbox could monopolize the DVD rental market and investors still wouldn't be excited because it can't move anywhere from there and it would end up plateauing in a very boring niche.
Investors don't care about profit of the business, they care about profit of their investment (ROI). Whether a company is profitable or bleeding money only matters as part of the prediction on where the share price will go.
> VCs generally want growth and even if Redbox could gobble up Netflix's DVD rental market share, the market itself is stagnant
Netflix IPOed in 2002 and Redbox's parent company is a penny stock (Chicken Soup of the Soul Entertainment // NASDAQ: CSSE)
VCs do not invest in public entities.
The companies that invest in public entities are Investment Banks and Private Equity, both of which are different industries with different norms and regulations from Venture Capital
>You would think Netflix getting out of the business should be a sign for shares to go up.
A massively corp with many experienced analysts considers a market no longer capable of producing a profit... to me that is a sign that the sector is dying.
There's probably a [small] steady-state business in there, but investors want growth.
Internet penetration is only estimated at 65% today (5.3 billion people), so I can quite confidently say that billions of people will still not have Internet access in 2033.
There are still places without running water and sewage, never mind electricity and Internet access. I'm going to guess that everyone you know has a smartphone, if not a laptop, kindle, and a tablet, plus home Internet access. But not everyone is so lucky, and even in the US, there are poor areas. Huge swaths still don't have cell phone service, never mind 5G. $500 for a Starlink disk, with a monthly service charge, ain't happening.
Some of these places are intentionally devoid of Internet - there are places in Napa, outside of San Francisco, where none of the landowners will allow cell-phone towers in the hilly region, because they don't want it, so there's still no cell access. 10 years won't change that.
Whether that's enough to sustain Redbox, specifically, is a different question, and sure, more people will have Internet access in 10 years than today, but "dying business" is just a perception. Just because you don't have a use case for it doesn't mean that others won't. OG tech company Yahoo! could be called a "dying business", but they did $280 million in revenue for Q2, 2023.
Yes you are! You’ve let IP rights holders rot your brain.
Are you aware that there are publicly funded buildings in most towns in the US that permit you to rent one or multiple books without a monthly subscription fee? And that the late fees charged by those institutions do not share any of those revenues with the author? And that this model has been around for hundreds of years?
Ok, it seems you are right. But it is not as obvious as you make it sound. I looked into this a little bit more. So, apparently software and audio recordings cannot be rented out and are excluded from the first sale exception to copyright. Movies studios tried to do get congress to do the same for movies but were unsuccessful. So, movies can actually be purchased and then rented out as you stated. But one can still not do whatever one wants with a DVD e.g. public performances (even free of charge) are not legal unless one buys the appropriate license.
millions of people rented nintendo/sega cartridges in the nineties. N actually tried suing blockbuster https://www.nintendotimes.com/1989/08/19/nintendo-sues-block... but couldnt on game lending grounds so went for xeroxing manuals. Blockbuster in return switched to third party manuals, but lawsuit failed.
It's not a growth market so any copycats are likely too small and boring to have received any attention. The licensing landscape also means it's not something you can easily bootstrap. It's a bad example really because while it would have been easy for Netflix to keep around as a profitable but shrinking side business, it isn't something that at this point in history lends itself to creating a new businesses around.
I don’t know of any copycat.