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For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night
- madengr 8y agoWonder why they just don’t start their own store?
- platz 8y agodo you want to negotiate a contract with hollywood?
- slededit 8y agoRenting store bought DVDs is legal. There was a big court case about it in the 90s.
- jedberg 8y agoThe beauty of Blockbuster is that you don’t have to! Thanks to the First Sale Doctrine, in the US, you don’t need permission from the copyright holder to loan out legal physical copies of copyright content. The reasons “rental copies” exist is because they were more expensive versions that were available early so the rental stores could have them before they were for sale. But it was (and I guess in rural Alaska maybe still is) perfectly viable to build a rental outfit based solely on retail copies of movies.
- ghaff 8y agoI don't remember how much it carried over to the DVD era, but there was a period when typical VHS tapes were priced very high and the expectation was that individuals would just rent them but some, like certain Disney films, were "priced to own" on the assumption they were the sort of movie which could be a Christmas stocking stuffer. I think some of the big chains also had deals with the studios where they'd get a bunch of discs for a reduced price and paid a revenue percentage or something like that.
- ralphc 8y agoThe start of this era was around 1987 with "Top Gun" https://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/15/arts/marketing-top-gun-cassette.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/15/arts/marketing-top-gun-ca...
- chiph 8y agoI recall tapes were selling in the $65-80 range. Which was a lot of money in the early 90's. Because tapes would wear out with each play, I elected to buy 12" LaserDiscs which cost only slightly more, but would never wear out. For those who never saw one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOrn2hBsYKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOrn2hBsYKE
- ghaff 8y agoI have a shelf full of laserdiscs that I honestly don't know what to with (and a laserdisc player). I don't want them and I assume there are individuals who do but I'm not about to go to a lot of trouble to sell them. I suppose I could put the whole thing on Craigslist, take it or leave it. But I'm far enough out of a big city that I've never had much luck with that tactic.
- mmt 8y agoIf you have enough unusual content, perhaps archive.org could arrange to have it taken to them. They seem to have an interest digitizing older, non-digital media.
- dawnerd 8y agoDepending on condition there’s quite the market for them on eBay. But yeah, it’s a hassle to package and ship them.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoeBay?
- ghaff 8y ago
- platz 8y ago> before they were for sale Right, I bet a substantial pct of customers would just buy the dvd outright these days, if they can just get it from retail
- jjeaff 8y agoThere was an interesting story about RedBox a few years ago. Hollywood was trying to block them from buying movies for their kiosks. So they were sending armies of employees with gift cards out to all the Best Buy, Walmart, and whoever else sold the movie and was buying them at retail. Even though a supreme Court case has upheld rental rights, Hollywood is still trying to keep them from buying the movies in the first place.
- ghaff 8y agoYou don't need contracts with Hollywood; you can just buy the discs--although my understanding is that at least the big renters did have deals of various sorts. The article says that the Alaska Blockbuster stores, which were owned by someone else, were just slowly failing. This isn't a case of successful stores being shut down because a parent company as a whole failed.
- jjeaff 8y agoI'm not sure how many copies on hand a rental store would need, but Hollywood has tried to block rental companies from buying in bulk for years. RedBox was sending employees out with gift cards to buy up enough stock. There were some lawsuits against retailers by Hollywood outfits for selling too many to single buyers.
- ghaff 8y agoThe relationship between the studios and disc renters has gone back and forth over the years. The time of news around Redbox seems to have been about 10 years ago [1] when DVD sales were supposedly starting to decline significantly. I'd be a bit surprised if it were an issue to the same degree today where video is often available for streaming rental (and on things like airline entertainment systems) before retail discs even go on sale. And I don't know the latest numbers but Redbox revenue was (unsurprisingly) declining sharply as of a year or so ago and Netflix is letting its DVD back catalog rot to the point where it's almost not worth it. [1] https://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/dvds-mitch-lowe-business-entertainment-redbox.html#2da218325927 https://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/dvds-mitch-lowe-business-e...
- hallman76 8y agoObligatory link to the Onion's Blockbuster Living Museum video: https://entertainment.theonion.com/historic-blockbuster-store-offers-glimpse-of-how-movi-1819594789 https://entertainment.theonion.com/historic-blockbuster-stor...
- Animats 8y agoIt may be time for video rental stores to make a minor comeback. Like vinyl. Netflix's online catalog keeps shrinking, and Youtube has been cracking down so hard that movies from the 1930s have been taken offline.
- pdq 8y agoRedbox is a much smarter business model. No rental space or employees needed.
- jedberg 8y agoBut doesn’t solve the problem. Selection is very limited due to the lack of space.
- st26 8y agoIs that really the problem? Everybody endlessly talks about how Netflix has failed to crack the recommendation nut for something like ten years now. Maybe a smaller, more curated selection will make a comeback, as the pendulum swings away from infinite selection (of mostly garbage).
- ghaff 8y agoIt solves the renting current blockbusters problem but, for most people with decent internet, that's not much of a problem and Redbox' results reflect that. As another commenter noted, Redbox doesn't solve the back catalog problem and Netflix increasingly doesn't either. Going forward you may have to go back to just buying discs for some types of films. (Torrents aren't very consistent with old movies either.)
- dbg31415 8y agoIn Search of the Last Great Video Store – The Black List Blog || https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982 https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-s... I grew up about 2 blocks away from Scarecrow Video in Seattle. I'm happy it's still around. Place was amazing, and... in the late 80s and early 90s they weren't dicks about renting R movies to kids like Blockbuster was. I remember being like 11, and I negotiated a monthly punch card in lieu of allowance. I could rent any 12 movies I wanted! Such power for a kid. And the clerk always had great suggestions. It's because of Scarecrow that I got introduced to great films early... The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Apartment, Giant, 12 Angry Men, Dr. Strangelove... anyway for a kid in a single parent home, I lucked out getting to watch old classics when my friends were all busy watching stupid cartoons and Saved By The Bell re-runs.
- loso 8y agoI used to love Blockbuster. But that love quickly faded with their business practices. Their policy of putting a hit against your credit report when you had a late charge on a movie was the first strike. Not a movie that you kept weeks and weeks on end at your house letting the charge pile up. Nope a two day late charge that you didn't pay because you just assumed that you would pay it the next time you rented a movie. There was a class action lawsuit against them about this very practice. The second strike was about lost movies. My ex rented movies so we could watch them. That night I put them on the floor of the back seat of my car so I could head in to work at the club. I came back and someone had gotten into the car and took the movies. I reported to theft to blockbuster expecting to have to pay for the movies. They tried to charge me $200 for each movie. $600 total. I asked them where they nuts. I wasn't paying that. I told them I could get the same movies down the street from Walmart at $20 a piece and give them to you. They said fine, go ahead and do that. Why would you be that unreasonable in the first place and try to charge me that crazy amount.
- throwaway15235 8y agoI used to manage a video rental store in Australia. Can't say anything abiut the credit report thing, that's just rediculious. With regards to the $200 each movie, it's like that because they want you to do what you did and go somewhere else to buy it. They can't tell you that directly though because it's walking the line copyright wise. Not sure about the US but here in Australia you have to buy the media from a licenced studio distributer (Always costs at least $10 more than kmart or target) for it to be allowed to be rented. By getting you to go out and get the movie they don't change the asset ID in their system and no one is any the wiser.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoOf course there are online video rentals available. We have Apple TV and just rent movies on that. I’m sure other services are available on Android based devices.
- joefranklinsrs 8y agoIt would be great if there was a way to rent original contents from different streaming sites. Let's say I want to rent 'Terrace House' and 'Sopranos' on the same night, this website would allow me to do that with one interface and one 'buy' button.
- dragonwriter 8y agoGoogle Search will let you locate such content (it has a special UI for it, which is both platform aware—it will note services that aren't available on your platform, like iTunes on Android, as such—and customizable) and pricing, but it doesn't have a purchase interface, since the services don't have purchase APIs. Most providers would probably be against anything that would facilitate such aggregation, since that would commoditize them.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I’m sure other services are available on Android based devices. Google Play Movies & TV is available on Android, iOS, and Web. There are plenty of services that aren't tied to major mobile OS providers, too.