I don't purchase movies anymore but I could see myself going to a store to rent a 4K blu-ray to get the commentary tracks. Those are hard to come by online.

That's one of the things that kills me about present day distribution. There is such a massive hole in not getting to hear from the creators the way you could with DVDs. Shows like The Simpsons, etc. have offered a massive amount of information presented through commentary, that wouldn't otherwise be known.

When I was a kid I'd watch Futurama on DVD with commentary and think "Wow I bet one day I'll be able to pause any movie and click on anything and get all the info about it." I can't believe we went the opposite direction.

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.

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. :/

That sounds like a bunch of work for very little return, not any new technology.

I guess the other side of that coin is I feel like we have more access to creators than ever with youtube and podcasts. If I want to "meet my heroes" so to speak, I don't need DVD extras, I can just watch them in all sorts of formats online. Pre internet, you couldn't really watch Scorcese on hot ones.

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?

I think that Dish doesn't want to sell the rights, at least not for a small sum. In the documentary "The Last Blockbuster", they discuss how the rights to continue to use the name for the store are renegotiated every X amount of years (I think it's 3?) and that if the deal doesn't go through that it's essentially the end of the store.

Funny because there were the same 2 sides to the cable companies. Your closest shop and your TV’s internet was out connection to the culture.

I’m ok renting or buying digital movies from a big corp like Apple or Disney now that I don’t have to drive to a store.

Though the pipe to my house doesn’t need a big corp because we should have a free national municipal fiber network.

Double so since something like Redbox could have definitely used the brand.

They could have bought the Blockbuster brand, and combined it into a gawdy 80s style amalgamam of purple (you know, blue plus red)...and called it something like BoxBuster! And beyond dvd rentals, sell Roku devices. But, alas! ;-)