Blockbuster's Blu-Ray Disc Rental Figures May Be Flawed

If you are a Blockbuster Online subscriber and you exchange your online rentals at stores for store rentals, you may have noticed that, sometimes, your store DVD rentals show up as Blu-ray discs in the At Home section of your Blockbuster Online queue. This commonly occurring error does not necessarily prove an inventory flaw; however, the error strongly suggests that Blockbuster inaccurately records some store DVD rentals as Blu-ray disc rentals.

If you do a lot of store exchanges and typically choose the DVD format, look in your Blockbuster Online rental history. There you may find several titles tagged with the [Blu-ray] tag. Depending on your rental preferences, you may notice that few or none of these supposed Blu-ray discs you rented from Blockbuster stores were really Blu-ray discs. They were just improperly tagged DVDs. Even more curious, this error seems to occur disproportionately often among new releases. Perhaps this is just a recent problem affecting only newer titles.

What is uncertain is whether or not Blockbuster is tagging discs inappropriately on purpose for some reason or if this is just another example of Blockbuster's incompetence. Regardless, many DVDs are being tagged incorrectly as Blu-ray discs in at least one system. If these errors are being carried over into other systems, such as the systems that provide data for inventory reporting and sales reporting, Blockbuster's numbers could be showing dramatically inflated figures for Blu-ray disc rentals.

There do seem to be stacks of unwanted Blu-ray discs just sitting on the shelves at Blockbuster stores. The excessive Blu-ray disc supply could stem from improper inventory reporting, or the improperly tagged discs could be concealing that Blu-ray discs are not terribly popular among Blockbuster store customers. Regardless, Blockbuster needs to get their act together and consistently tag DVDs as DVDs and Blu-ray discs as Blu-ray discs in all of their systems.

Imagine if you lost a store DVD that was electronically mislabeled as a Blu-ray disc. Would the store charge you the lower DVD price or the higher Blu-ray disc price? That could be an unpleasant surprise. If you lost the physical disc, you would have no proof it was a DVD, and you would be at the mercy of Blockbuster's inaccurate computer system.