“Our goal is to be everywhere that you would imagine there should be movies,” began Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster’s head of digital strategy. “That means partnering with every consumer electronics manufacturer on the planet. Our mantra is: No channel left behind, no title left behind.”
This kind of bold statement is characteristic of Lewis, who spoke with Fast Company about the company’s plans to transform its brick-and-mortar business for the digital age. In part one of this two-part interview, Lewis discusses Nintendo and Netflix, and explains why he finds Apple “unconscionable.”
Tomorrow we switch our focus to the company’s financial future and new Droid X app. Will Blockbuster’s aggressive digital strategy be enough to save the crumbling video-rental giant from bankruptcy?
Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes told me recently that figuring out how to get movies from his “Nintendo machine to the screen” makes his “head hurt to think about.” Is he less optimistic about the company’s digital strategy?
Jim is fully supportive. If there’s a difference you hear between us, it’s more the vocabulary we use than the concepts we articulate. Our job is to simplify the process [of watching movies via the Nintendo Wii] so it’s like using a DVD. You shouldn’t have to learn all this crazy stuff. Why does it make sense to go to your den, boot up your computer, then log into Netflix to program old movies into a separate queue before you can wander back to press play?
