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 Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:08 pm Post subject: dvds365 article about its takeover of movietrak, qflicks... |
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Dvds365 provide the admin service for other sites and bought them out for a 6 figure sum.
It wants to look at providing downloading movies.
But what is strange it may be article in mistake or maybe true is that they only have around 15 staff in there distribution store.
Considering they claim to 25,000 dvds and bought 3 other sites seems these 15 people must be working day and night .
from:
business.scotsman.com/media.cfm?id=164972005
| Quote: | THE online DVD rental business headed by technology entrepreneur Bill Dobbie has bought up three rival players as it fights to rapidly grow market share.
Dobbie, who has raised millions from selling part of his stake in Glasgow-based net security firm Iomart, is investing heavily in his latest venture, DVDs365.com.
The acquisition of three competitors, for an undisclosed six-figure sum, takes its subscriber numbers past the 12,000 mark. Dobbie, managing director of Edinburgh-based The DVD Biz which operates the site, is targeting 100,000 users within five years.
Although other companies - including the likes of Blockbuster and Amazon - are offering similar services, the online DVD rental market in the UK is still in its infancy and Dobbie is keen to quickly build market share in a sector predicted to show huge growth.
As well as increasing its customer base, the acquisition of rivals Mailbox Movies, MovieTrak and Qflicks.co.uk has increased DVDs365’s stock of titles to around 25,000, held at a distribution centre in Fife.
"There is some consolidation going on in the market at the moment and these acquisitions will help us in our aim of becoming one of the leading players," said Dobbie.
All three websites will continue to operate under their own brand names for the time being but administration will be handled by DVDs365.
Dobbie is also looking at DVDs365 becoming the first UK-based company to offer downloadable films to broadband users later this year and is currently talking to film studios about making their releases available. "That would enable us to expand into Europe," he said.
At its distribution hub in Fife, DVDs365 currently employs around 15 staff.
Customers choose titles through a website, receive them by post the next day and then return them in a freepost reply envelope.
The company’s stock is around five times that held in an average video shop.
Subscribers sign up to a pay-monthly package allowing them to hire a set number of titles.
Although Dobbie said that he believed there would always be a market for high-street DVD and video shops to cater for impulse hires, he said online services offered distinct advantages.
"We can offer far more titles than a traditional shop and customers can search our database for films by a particular director or subject and so on." he said.
"You can return the DVDs when you like, within reason, so there are no fines and it also gets round the problem of hiring a film for the night and then something else cropping up which stops you watching it."
The company is also able to track customers’ hiring patterns to suggest other titles they might be interested in seeing.
Popular rentals at DVDs365 at the moment range from new releases such as Wimbledon and Spider-Man 2 to classics such as Trainspotting, On Golden Pond and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.
The growth of online DVD rental services has hit high-street video stores badly in recent years, with the number of films rented from shops falling from 186 million in 2001 to 153 million last year. Online DVD rentals have captured an estimated 10% of the total film rental market volume after just two years.
Earlier this month Dobbie banked £2.64m from the sale of two million shares in Iomart, where he is a non-executive director. In September he had sold £2.5m worth of the company’s stock. Dobbie still holds just over 3.5 million shares in the company worth more than £4.75m.
Although Edinburgh-based Dobbie would not say exactly how much he has invested in DVDs365, he revealed it was a "seven-figure sum".
Dobbie co-founded Iomart six years ago with current chief executive Angus MacSween. |
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