Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

dallasnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 264 posts

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#231

Post by ahartmetz »

vidarh wrote: post #215
ahartmetz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just noticed this again today. Spotify vs Hype Machine (browse, then "recommendations" by checking out people who also liked $song). Spotify is somehow stuck on dark, aggressive electronic music for me. It's not the only thing that I like, not even my favorite really.

Music recommendations are even worse than movies, in that they need to take into account what you've just listened to (if I'm listening to a specific genre, I'm unlikely to want something in a very different tempo and style), time of day (at bed time I'll often put on some soft classical music; that doesn't mean I want that every other time because I play it a lot), mood (if I suddenly play 1980's pop, it's probably…

last.fm had my favorite auto-recommendation system, but it seems like they removed the personal and artist radio features.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#233

Post by vidarh »

ahartmetz wrote: post #231
vidarh wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music recommendations are even worse than movies, in that they need to take into account what you've just listened to (if I'm listening to a specific genre, I'm unlikely to want something in a very different tempo and style), time of day (at bed time I'll often put on some soft classical music; that doesn't mean I want that every other time because I play it a lot), mood (if I suddenly play 1980's pop, it's probably…

last.fm had my favorite auto-recommendation system, but it seems like they removed the personal and artist radio features.

Yeah, they're the closest I've been to being happy about recommendations by far, though they too did get into very weird "pockets" of recommendations for me at times (not bad, just very obsessively giving me music from a very small niche of my music interests).

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#234

Post by MomoXenosaga »

cstever wrote: post #197
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just your usual nostalgia. I lived in the age before internet and it was shit. Then Kazaa happened and I could finally download Naruto and Gundam.

For me (my 2 cents), I think it's more than nostalgia. It's about community. It's about face to face interaction. I recently listened to a piece on NPR about lunches and working in France and why it's important. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/07/1103566695/lunching-work-when... The part I took away was how everyone sat together for lunch and you might find yourself at a table with a stranger who is not in your field but…

In my country minimum wage workers don't have to fake it so you are unlikely to get much "community" out of them lol.

Consumers and employees aren't in it for the social interaction.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#235

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

WalterBright wrote: post #213
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall Redbox existing, at least in my area, during that time.

This was before Netflix streaming, when Netflix was just dvds.

Yeah -- still don't remember Redbox then. I did use Netflix DVDs by mail, too.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#236

Post by cxr »

causi wrote: post #72
TylerE wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one thing Amazon does well. Pause almost anything and it will show you the actors presently on screen (with headshots, which you can click on to get more info. They'll also name the song playing, if any.

Eh, that's not really anything you couldn't do with google almost as easily. I mean real multimedia. I want to pause Lord of the Rings, click on a sword, and get the passage where the sword is described in the book. I want to click on a character and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the costume. I want it all.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu, but for film.

It's interesting that Lucasfilm ostensibly invested in the xanaverse but instead of doing something like this, they somehow became focused on creating an MMO instead.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#239

Post by pmarreck »

_fat_santa wrote: post #28
kerblang wrote: post #3

It's sort of bizarre that an entrenched, widely despised corporate behemoth thoroughly deserving its own demise has turned into an anachronistic mom-and-pop shop that just gets by. But isn't this the worst of both worlds? It's dystopian nostalgia. Maybe I just have too much of a grudge against the 1980's...

The way I see it, there are really two Blockbusters. One is an evil corporate behemoth, the other is the neighborhood video store that lives on in our memories. These guys aren't keeping Blockbuster running so much as they are keeping the nostalgic memory of it going. TBH I'm a bit surprised no one has tried to buy the Blockbuster brand from Dish and restart the company. I feel like you could effectively run one much…

Picture this- you walk into a Blockbuster and only the cardboard covers are on the shelves. You touch one and a ML-driven camera begins a preview of the movie on a nearby screen. You can chat with anyone else there of course. When you find something you like, you take the cardboard cover (recyclable of course) out of the store and another ML-driven camera records the transaction and automatically bills you for the rental, then sets up a stream of it at your home on their app running on your device (appletv or whatever). (If you don't actually want the cardboard cover you can deposit it into a box outside the store, but the nominal cost of them is low enough that the store wouldn't care if you actually brought it home.)

Best of both worlds?

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#240

Post by pmarreck »

TylerE wrote: post #77
causi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that's not really anything you couldn't do with google almost as easily. I mean real multimedia. I want to pause Lord of the Rings, click on a sword, and get the passage where the sword is described in the book. I want to click on a character and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the costume. I want it all.

Googling opens you up to spoilers.

I once confused "No Way Home" with "Far From Home" and ended up spoiling the one I hadn't seen yet. :/
Post reply on HN