Taking Advantage of the ‘New Media’ Boom
Aug 17th, 2009 | By Greg Gunner Guenthner | Category: Stock Market InvestingImagine waking up tomorrow morning with no access to the Internet. No e-mail. No news. No streaming video.
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning with no access to the Internet. No e-mail. No news. No streaming video.
Just when it thought the competition was leveling off, Blockbuster (NYSE:BBI) faces another nasty barrage. The company missed estimates yesterday, now the Street is forcing it to pay.
The movie rental industry is in trouble. Blockbuster is in the headlines today as its shares fall by as much as 30%. Is a bankruptcy filing in the cards?
On Wednesday, leading stocks started to sell off, but you wouldn’t know it from the action in the indexes. The selling continued Thursday, and it hit the indexes as well. And then on Friday, the indexes were up (led by financial and energy stocks) while leading stocks were down again. It was pretty much a carbon copy of Wednesday — while the indexes were up, the big money was selling the leaders.
Facing near extinction at the hands of Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) and increasingly popular pay-per-view movies, Blockbuster Inc. (BBI) announced that it would team with on-demand television powerhouse Tivo Inc. (TIVO) to sell and rent movies via digital video recorders (DVRs).
The movie-rental business is in the middle of a digital revolution. Internet-enabled TVs will allow direct downloading of movies. And industry leaders are battling to snap up a potentially huge long-term revenue stream. Andrew Snyder says investors should look to the firms like TiVo (NASDAQ:TIVO) and Sonic Solutions (NASDAQ:SNIC), who sell the technology to make this all happen.
Can you hear that, Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI)? It’s the sound of obsolescence. With the news that LG Electronics will be producing high-definition televisions that will stream movies from Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), you can add another nail in the coffin for Blockbuster.
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U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers will likely cut its key interest rate to 2.0% from 2.25% this, which would mark the seventh such move since the central bank launched its rate-reduction campaign in mid-September.