The Profit Prophet

The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot: How Blockbuster's Data Proved Netflix Wrong (And Why They Ignored It)

Episode Summary

In 2004, Blockbuster's internal analytics team ran the numbers on this scrappy DVD-by-mail startup called Netflix and concluded it would never scale beyond a niche market. They were spectacularly wrong—but not for the reasons you think. This is the story of how the most data-rich company in entertainment got blindsided by their own customers, and why sometimes being right about the numbers means being dead wrong about human behavior.