Flashback

Step back, just 6 years ago. Think about just the process of renting a movie. What did you do? You probably drove to the local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, walked up and down the isles with your friends trying to find a movie that pleased everyone, paid to rent it, and drove home to watch it. How does that compare to how you rent a movie now?

Now when you want to watch a movie we no longer want to get in our car and drive somewhere. We now can get on our netflix accounts and stream a movie from the internet, or download it off of iTunes without ever leaving the sofa. I think that we have gotten so used to having things "on-demand" that we are too lazy to drive up the street to rent a movie, we would rather get it now on the internet, or have Netflix send us a disk to our mailbox so that we don't have to venture away from our homes.

I look around and movie rental companies are going under. Hollywood Video went out of business just a couple years ago, and now Blockbusters are closing down everywhere. Technology has completly changed how we consume media, and soon DVDs may be a thing of the past.


Books are another thing that have been impacted. We used to mainly use physical copies of books, now we have devices such as the Amazon Kindle that allow us to read e-books. Amazon recently reported that the sale of e-books has actually surpassed the sale of paperbooks. It is also causing brick-and-morter stores such as Borders to have problems. Borders recently went under and I suspect it is due to companies such as Amazon who have developed their e-book platforms.