In the last hours, information about it began to spread Netflix, the dean of streaming services, plans to open physical stores, i.e. business premises. Of course, this led to a lot of speculation, a lot of jokes, and without a doubt what I liked the most about how much I read were those who posited the possibility that for some reason Netflix was considering reviving the business of renting content in a physical format.

Obviously not, it’s not, in fact last August the company shut down its mail-order movie rental business, which few people remember, It was the business model it began operating with in the late 1990s. We’ve said on previous occasions that the Blockbuster video store chain had an opportunity to buy Netflix at the time, a missed opportunity that surely has haunted those responsible for the now-defunct company more than once.

Netflix, as the dean of streaming services, had something to do with the disappearance of Blockbuster, yes, and the physical rental business, but It is a mistake to attribute it exclusively, because in those days it was already more than clear that the future was in digital content distribution. Netflix may have been a battering ram, yes, but it carried the power of a model that was already called upon to replace the one that had existed until then. This means that physical media rental did not disappear because of Netflix, and thus Netflix cannot and has no interest in “resurrecting” it.

The explanation is much simpler and also more logical. As we can read in Bloomberg, Netflix plans to open its first physical stores in the United Statesand they will be dedicated content related products available on the platform. It’s known that merchandising dedicated to audiovisual production is the most lucrative business (just say Disney, for example), so the streaming service could find a new way to monetize in this channel.

In the last few years Netflix has had some pretty big hits (although some were not originally their projects), from Stranger Things to La Casa de Papel, The Squid Game or Cobra Kai or, to give just a few examples, they are productions that offer a huge way in terms of sales of all types of related objects. But as a producer, Netflix could go even further, including in movies and series designed to be sold later in those stores.

This seriously an interesting twist on traditional product placement (product placement), which companies pay for the inclusion of their products or services in films and series. In this case, it could be Netflix themselves placing their products in said content to promote them to later sell them in their own stores, which is a great deal.