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The success of Blockbuster video may have in part been due to its cleanliness, but from my experience it was because your mom 'n pop shop would have two copies
by A_COMPUTER 11y ago
The success of Blockbuster video may have in part been due to its cleanliness, but from my experience it was because your mom 'n pop shop would have two copies of a new blockbuster movie so you'd never get to see it, and Blockbuster would have a hundred waiting for you. These old movies are awesome, they bypassed the MPAA and touched topics that a studio would've considered too risky for general distribution, indie VHS really took over where drive-in movies left off. But in the end most people didn't care, they just wanted to watch the Matrix and Blockbuster had two shelves of it stacked two-deep. I don't know what's taken over since VHS. Maybe crowdfunding could fill this gap, but nothing will have the "feel" that these movies did, because nowadays with the Internet nothing can be truly "obscure" for very long.
When I lived in Iowa City in the 1990's, I used to go to a tiny video store called The Tofu Hut (How's that name for a deep 90's culture reference) which did a marvelous job of picking a selection of foreign movies, anime, fetish pornography and independent and exploitation films. There will never be places like that again. They existed in a small gap when VHS was thriving and Blockbuster wasn't dominant.
- danharaj 11y agoIt would help if video content on the Internet were not centralized and commodified at huge impersonal sites like YouTube. There definitely ought to be such communities on the Internet. It's easier than ever to make film and it's easier than ever to connect with others and share.
- krapp 11y agoIt doesn't have to be. If you're willing to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth no one is stopping you from hosting and streaming your own videos. What youtube and similar sites really centralize is not the content, but the distribution.
- seanp2k2 11y agoAre you aware of Karagarga?
- 9872 11y agoWhat's your complaint about youtube? They host exabytes of video and make it freely available worldwide. There is no better resource for video creators.
- danharaj 11y agoYoutube decides what content is permissible by being one of the large gatekeepers for distribution. They also are a large lever for large copyright holders to push on to hurt small content creators who have less recourse for action (DMCA and whatnot). Youtube is ultimately private property. It is not a commons. That's my complaint. The whole Internet is a commons but there's no commonly shared infrastructure on the scale of youtube for content distribution and relating content to other content and to communities of people, unless you count search engines as that infrastructure.
- 9872 11y agoThat's why it exists. There can never be a commons. There can be large private sites or small ones. Large ones like youtube are more useful.
- SomeStupidPoint 11y agoTheir content policing borders on conspiracy to commit commercial copyright infringement, and goes considerably past what is required by law.
- 11y ago