Besides basically handing the online rental space over to Netflix, it leaves it the sole powerhouse movie rental company to remain profitable—Movie Gallery, the no. 2 B&M chain, is bankrupt—and therefore the undisputed heavyweight champion of the rental world. Make no mistake about it, folks, things are looking grim for the corner rental store.

It's not like Blockbuster was totally unaware of this. Moving into new distribution channels is increasingly looking like the only way to survive the video wars—hopefully Netflix doesn't stop following through on their bolder, more intuitive ideas, lest we write about it sinking with the physical media rental market altogether in several years. [Forbes via Consumerist, Flickr]

Although it wasn't the first NTSC color TV set to ship to consumers (that honor goes to Westinghouse, which first shipped its color TV set in February, 1954), the RCA Victor CT-100 was the first to ship in volume, with the company planning a production run of 2000 TVs. The CT-100 had a 15-inch screen, 37 tubes inside and in its console form factor weighed 175 pounds. It was first shipped in late April, 1954, and sold for $1000, the equivalent of about $7500 in today's money.

Other manufacturers such as Motorola, Admiral and Hoffman also shipped limited quantities of color TVs in 1954 at similar prices. Later that year, RCA rolled out a 21-inch color receiver, and by two years later, the color TV revolution had temporarily stalled. Even though color TV prices had dropped as low as $495, that was still too expensive for most consumers. Also slowing sales to a crawl was the fact that few color broadcasts were available and there was a perception that color TVs were unreliable and difficult to adjust. Color TV sales didn't really take off until about 10 years later. [Wired and Steve's Vintage Color TV Page]