Adios Shatner DVD Club:

A year ago I wrote about coming across the Shatner DVD Club and wondered if anybody else had signed up? It was a club where for $47.99 a year every month you were mailed a new sci-fi DVD picked my Shatner himself that you could keep.

The only reply to that post was from one of the people responsible for building the website for Mr. Shatner giving prices on Amazon for some of the movies. The deal appeared to be pretty good actually but by looking at the screenshot above, there weren’t enough takers interested in Shatner’s picks and it was killed a mere year later. The original Star Trek series lasted three years. I thought about joining the Shatner DVD Club, but never did. I wasn’t alone.

Snail mail DVD club days numbered too
Might get some pushback for writing this, and I’m not alone or the first person with these thoughts, but I don’t think snail mail DVD services like Netflix have much more time in the tank, especially as more and more bandwidth becomes available. In fact I’d say 2007 and 2008 are the transition years that Netflix turns into just another movie download service.

What they could do now to stave off death is try and cut a deal with Microsoft or Apple to join their stores somehow, someway. I’m not sure how or why either of those two companies would be interested but in my opinion those are the major two TV/movie distribution points going forward. At least until something bigger and better comes along.

Netflix is still viable but they have clearly peaked. The Hacking Netflix blogger (a good blogger by the way) whom tipped me off to this Shatner DVD club closing story might want to start working on another blog now, if he isn’t already doing so, before he runs out of source material. I guess he could prolong the inevitable by sharing memories of what Netflix used to be like or branch into other movie-related sites (he already reports on Blockbuster online, who is equally doomed), but the name is going to haunt the site the way the iTunes Music Store haunted Apple when they started selling TV and videos.

This is the risk in using a website to focus on niche content and the reason when we started our VTOR blogging group we chose to focus on all virtual reality sites and not only one site in particular (although we currently focus on Second Life the most at the moment).

Any Shatner DVD Club bloggers — unlikely there were any — are now floating in a boat without oars.

I’m sure Netflix execs are hoping and praying that HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray catches fire because it takes a lot longer to download HD movies than it does DVDs. Mark Cuban had this wild idea of sending a hard drive loaded with a bunch of movies already on it but that idea won’t catch on any more than the Shatner DVD Club. Ok, maybe it could have some legs if 300 TB drives become a reality.

If you look at current technology some sort of P2P solution would seem to be the most affordable scalable solution, but Hollywood seems to be acting like it’s the tool of the devil.

When Sony bought the Grouper P2P video service for $65 million in August 2006, they positioned themselves nicely to utilyze P2P if indeed that becomes the chosen method of legal movie distribution in the future. So far though, Sony hasn’t done anything significant with this property. Would be a shame to not see them find some way to incorporate this into their Playstation Store (PS3) and offer TV, movies and videos, including video blogs. I wonder if that’s what they are thinking about?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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