If Cook was a little unimpressed at first, then after hearing Li Xuan's description of Blockbuster's next development plan, his eyes became brighter and brighter! Mailing services, the Internet, these novel words seemed to open another window for him at once!

The U.S. is one of the busiest postal services in the world, and mail order has been around for more than 100 years. One of the reasons why the video rental industry did not offer mailing services in the past is that the old-fashioned videotapes are relatively large. If two or three reels of tape were mailed together, it would already be a small package, and the cost of postage alone would eat up most of the rental income of the rental store.

The VCD that appears now is different, it is only a thin slice. Even if several DVDs are put together, they can easily be stuffed into an envelope. This gives the rental shop enough confidence.

In particular, if a company like BesTV can quickly expand its scale to the whole country, it can rely on its huge order volume to keep the postage low enough in the negotiation with the post office. In this way, customers only need to pay a little more dollar or two, and they can avoid the rush to rent a film by car, which is undoubtedly a very attractive option.

This is also one of the advantages of VCD compared with old-fashioned video recorders, of course, this advantage is not enough for VCD players to quickly open up the North American market. The Eastern Bloc also has a series of systematic promotion strategies, such as buying out the recording rights of a large number of old films.

Film rights in the North American market are not cheap, and in many cases a single film can sell tens of millions of dollars. But that's usually a hot new film that has just been painted. For most older films, after the first wave of videotape sales. The price of the copyright will drop a lot.

Especially with new technologies like VCD players, for film companies, they already have a lot of money on the heads of video tape distributors. Now you can take advantage of the release of VCD discs to sell the video rights again, why not!

Don't look at the VCD player has not yet begun to enter North America, Europe and other markets, but the Eastern Group has silently begun to buy the VCD transcription rights of old movies in the libraries of major film companies in advance. For example, Columbia Pictures, which has entered the eyes of Sony, has the largest film library among major Hollywood studios.

However, the rumors released by the Oriental Group are intended to compete with Sony for the equity of Columbia Pictures. This gossip directly caused the stock price of Columbia to skyrocket, and the major shareholder Coca-Cola Company even more. The offer for the equity in the hand has been raised quite a bit.

In fact, even if Li Xuan really wanted to buy a mainstream Hollywood studio, he would not choose to attack Columbia Pictures. Because its relationship with CBS is too close, it is easy to wonder if Li Xuan is a drunkard who does not mean to drink.

In the case that Li Xuan is already inextricably linked with NBC broadcasting. If he continues to attack CBS, which is also one of the three major public television networks in the United States, he will inevitably attract countless hostile eyes.

However, the smoke bombs released by the Eastern Group have at least made it much more difficult for Sony to acquire Columbia Pictures. At the same time, the Eastern Group itself has cooperated with many Hollywood giants such as Universal and MGM. A VCD issuance agreement was reached.

JVC, Sony and other Japanese video recorder manufacturers. It is not unaware of the actions of the Eastern Bloc, but the countermeasures that can be made are very limited. What they can do is, on the one hand, to vigorously exaggerate the possible piracy harm caused by VCDs, and on the other hand, to form an alliance to threaten film companies to boycott VCDs.

The threat of Japanese manufacturers may still have a certain effect on small film companies. Because they basically do not have the ability to distribute video tapes on their own, most of them choose to sell the video rights to specialized video distribution companies. Behind many issuing companies, there are Japanese funds.

But for several Hollywood giants, they want to better tap the profits of the video tape market. Each of its subsidiaries has its own issuing company and sales channels. On the contrary, the upstream copyright content they control can play a decisive role in the video format war.

But Sony has already announced. With the end of its own BETA format, JVC's VHS format completely unified the entire VCR market. Naturally, the Hollywood giants lost the opportunity to profit from the two major format alliances. And VCD technology suddenly jumped out at this time, just enough to take over Sony's class, forming a restrain on VHS recorders.

Therefore, Hollywood's major production giants not only do not reject VCD, but deliberately support it a little, so that it can better compete with VHS video recorders. Of course, in order to appease the industry's concerns about VCD piracy, the Eastern Group has also provided a technical solution.

The most advanced VCD player in the U.S. market is not a DVD player produced by RCA, but a new generation of personal computer ABC-6 computer launched by Aikang. The computer, which uses the new generation of ERM processors, comes standard with an optical drive. In addition to reading and writing the software copied on the CD, users can also play VCD movies directly through the CD-ROM drive.

The Oriental Group is buying the rights to old Hollywood movies on a large scale, and it is difficult for Japanese companies to stop it. But it was easy for them to motivate videotape distributors to band together against the new VCD players. In the recent buy-out agreements signed by a number of distributors with film companies for the video rights of new films, they would rather bid higher than prohibit the film companies from selling the video rights of the films to the Oriental Group for a second time in VCD format.

The Eastern Bloc is not prepared to force VCDs in the United States, so it is natural that it will not spend money to compete with videotape distributors for the rights to expensive new films. And since Li Xuan didn't want to bleed, he naturally needed to come up with an ingenious curve to save the country.

If the Oriental Group is not yet able to compete with Japanese manufacturers in the home appliance market for the time being, then it can completely crush Japanese companies in the computer industry. Akon added an optical drive to the standard equipment list of the new ABC-6 computer in order to promote the CD-ROM in order to promote it.

Compared with today's mainstream floppy disks, optical discs have faster read and write speeds, and the storage capacity of data is much higher. The English name of the disc is CD, and VCD is a branch of CD, ABC-6 computer optical drive technology standard, naturally there is also VCD format reading support.

Most of the business of American video rental stores actually comes from those hot new films. VCD players that are not ready to compete for the copyright of chip video recording are naturally difficult to attract the favor of consumers in the United States. But if users don't need to spend a penny more, they can directly use the computer instead of the VCR and TV to enjoy the movie, which is undoubtedly very attractive to those who have ABC-6 computers!

And when the VCD format can basically cover most of the old movie libraries except for some recent new films, and when users can choose to have Blockbuster rental stores all over the United States mail their selected discs directly to their homes without leaving home, the acceptance of VCD as a new audio-visual format in the United States will undoubtedly increase rapidly.

This is the roadmap that the Eastern Bloc has arranged for VCDs to enter the US market, opening up a new channel through its greatest strength, the computer industry.

And when the VCD format has laid a sufficient foundation in the United States, the new generation of DVD players that have gone further in technology will go to the front of VHS recorders. At that time, Li Xuan will definitely not be as stingy with investment in content copyright as he is now! )