Case Study: Blockbuster achieves 50% IT-cost reduction and rapid Nordic expansion with Amazon CloudFront

How Blockbuster cut its IT costs in half while expanding to new markets by using AWS

Blockbuster, operated by TDC Group in the Nordics, provides transactional video‑on‑demand to customers in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway and faced a major scaling and personalization challenge as it expanded. Its on‑premises data center could not support rapid subscriber growth or deliver consistently high‑quality streaming, so Blockbuster moved to AWS and adopted Amazon CloudFront (CDN) alongside services such as Lambda@Edge, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Elastic Beanstalk to provide global content delivery, DDoS protection, and serverless compute.

Using Amazon CloudFront for distribution plus Lambda@Edge, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, S3 and BI from NPAW for analytics and personalization, the new architecture launched across Sweden, Finland, and Norway and reached 10,000 subscribers within six weeks. The AWS implementation enabled high‑quality, personalized streaming at scale and cut Blockbuster’s IT build and maintenance costs by about 50%, while simplifying operations and improving customer insights.

Blockbuster

Henrik Loop

Chief Technical Officer