ARTICLE · The business
Episode 3: From Blockbusters to Stream: The Fall and Rise of Entertainment Titans
A business can understand its current product perfectly and still miss that customers have found a different way to satisfy the same desire.
Episode 3: From Blockbusters to Stream: The Fall and Rise of Entertainment Titans
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The move from video rental to streaming is a vivid way to examine adaptation. The underlying desire to watch something enjoyable persisted while the route to satisfying it changed. Delivery, convenience, selection, and the surrounding business model became part of a new experience.
“Adapt or perish” captures the urgency, but it leaves the hard question unanswered: what should change, and what should remain? A company cannot pursue every new trend. It needs a way to recognize when customer behavior is exposing a meaningful weakness in its existing offer.
Define the job without naming your product#
Imagine a rental store describing its purpose as “renting discs.” That definition makes the disc central. Describing the purpose as “helping people choose and watch entertainment at home” opens a wider set of possibilities.
The broader definition does not automatically produce a successful strategy. It does help people notice alternatives that the narrower definition excludes.
The same exercise works for an individual career. A particular tool may be how you currently contribute, while the deeper capability is solving problems, communicating ideas, or understanding a domain. When the tool changes, that capability may still have a place. Watch with one skill or business in mind and ask which customer need could survive a major change in the method used to meet it.
See also