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Written by Kevin Kelleher
Posted Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM PT

Blockbuster: Now Only Slightly Less Miserable!

When was the last time you rented a DVD from a Blockbuster store? If it was recent enough for you to remember the exact date, you’re in a shrinking club.

The video retailer behemoth that stomped many a mom-and-pop store out of existence is now finding people are renting fewer of its DVDs. Rentals at its U.S. locations fell 2.6 percent in the last three months of 2008 (in a conference call, CEO Jim Keyes blamed Hollywood for producing crappy movies), while sales of video games, game consoles and used DVDs rose 37 percent.

bbi-vs-nflx

In other words, the epic Blockbuster-Netflix battle that has waged for several years isn’t quite over, but Netflix is doing a great job of bloodying up its adversary. So Blockbuster is hoping to fare better against GameStop and Amazon.com.

Limelight Dims, Blames the Writers

Remember all those stories and reports about how the writers’ strike was driving TV viewers over to the Internet? Limelight Networks wants you to forget them.

After posting a larger-than-expected loss for its most recent quarter, Limelight says the current quarter won’t be much better. Why? It’s those pesky picketing writers, who are costing Limelight $1 million this quarter in lost business. And they’ll cost Limelight millions more this year, even though they went back to work last week.

Limelight, which like Akamai makes money by shuttling high-bandwidth digital content around the Internet, said big customers are trimming their online spending until the release of new programming returns to normal.