Bringing the video store to your home. Literally.
Widely regarded as one of the world's first in-home Video on Demand (VOD) market trials (with the Time-Warner Carousel as a close sibling), Blockbuster on Demand was a partnership with IBM that recreated a virtual Blockbuster Video and Music store on a living room screen.
Pretend there's a platform - now build something on it
The BBOD trial utilized some of the first MPEG-1 decoder cards available, souped-up PCs, and early remote controls back when they were simply number pads. As a result, we were limited to no more than ten on-screen options at any given time (one per number). The ubiquitous directional arrows with a central Select button was borne of the design lessons learned in this trial.
It wasn't all slick servers and broadband networks. That was the promise of the "near future". When a homeowner selected a movie on their TV screen, a dot-matrix printer buzzed to life in a rented home/makeshift "Mission Control" down the street. There, an engineer tore off the order sheet, grabbed the corresponding video cassette off a shelf, plunked it in a VCR, set a video router to point to the correct house, then pressed Play. The video signal ran over coax through the neighborhood, direct to each home's set-top box.
Being first ain't always sexy.
All that mattered was proving people would push PLAY.
In the mid 90's, "watch what you want, when you want" was long-promised but not yet delivered. We willed it into existence with a lot of "man behind the curtain" grunt work disguised as magic — and proved the model that the entire streaming economy would later be built on.