3 ms·

I ditched all my subscription services a year ago and now use the DVD rental place on the other side of town. It has 120,000+ titles, including TV shows. Sure,

by sbf501 4y ago

I ditched all my subscription services a year ago and now use the DVD rental place on the other side of town. It has 120,000+ titles, including TV shows. Sure, I don't get to watch the latest trends, but it is superior than streaming for my needs. (I was using Kanopy, which is fantastic, but has a limit per month of 6!) I think we need to return to this model because streaming services have completely effed it all up. EDIT: Which is ironic, because I really thought streaming video would be the future, instead it is just a bunch of scammy charges for content you don't own, and hoards of crappy shows because major studios are too greedy and repetitive. I'm glad A24 exists.

eslaught 4y ago
How does your local video rental place have 120K+ titles? We used several video rental stores around the time the Netflix DVD service debuted. The reason we switched and never looked back was that frankly, none of our rental stores had ever been very good. The selection was always limited and spotty, and if you got unlucky it might be checked out already even if they owned a copy. This streaming thing we've got now doesn't match Netflix in its heyday, but it's still miles better than anything we had pre-Netflix.
- jusssi 4y ago
  At least the local rental store has (edit: had) the incentive to have things people want to watch, because they're pay per view. Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them.
  - eslaught 4y ago
    I don't completely get this comment, to be honest. As a matter of empirical fact, many video rental stores sucked. Your sibling comment addresses the case of Block Buster, but I remember going to our one truly independent store and not being impressed by it either. So there's that. But addressing your second point, I think we must have different viewing habits. I figure out what I want to watch, then I subscribe to it and I watch that show. If that increases my total subscriptions beyond what I'm comfortable with, I cancel the least recently used service. At no point do I use the in-service search function, so it really doesn't matter to me what else they offer. If they have one great show and a bunch of mediocre fluff, I'll watch that one show and leave. Maybe this sounds crazy, but if I'm careful about it it's not even that much more expensive then video rentals were back in the day.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them. On the contrary, their incentive is to have as much content as possible, to keep as many people subscribed as possible. Quantity instead of quality, because few really good shows/movies won't keep millions of people subscribed once they've watched them, there needs to be other content remaining.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Any video rental shop still in business today must have an excellent collection, otherwise they'd have gone the way of Blockbuster 15 years ago (they had a truly abysmal selection towards the end, as you describe. But in the glory days of VHS rental, independent rental shops often had amazing collections.)
  - eslaught 4y ago
    I guess in principle I get this. But unless the store is physically huge, which seems unlikely, then it's a bit hard to imagine how an independent store would have enough selection to compete. It seems much more likely to be that the store would focus on aggressive curation. Which is to say, it would be highly dependent on both the store and your personal tastes happening to line up in order to of any value to you. That was my experience with the one truly independent store we had in town: I guess it could have been a fine store, but I wasn't in a position to tell since they very clearly did not cater to my tastes. They're gone now along with Blockbuster, so I guess the market spoke on that one.
- sbf501 4y ago
  I'm wrong by quite a bit (+50%), it is 80K: https://moviemadness.org/ https://moviemadness.org/ Lots of their DVDs are in sleeves in filing cabinets/boxes.

by sbf501 4y ago

eslaught 4y ago

How does your local video rental place have 120K+ titles? We used several video rental stores around the time the Netflix DVD service debuted. The reason we switched and never looked back was that frankly, none of our rental stores had ever been very good. The selection was always limited and spotty, and if you got unlucky it might be checked out already even if they owned a copy. This streaming thing we've got now doesn't match Netflix in its heyday, but it's still miles better than anything we had pre-Netflix.

jusssi 4y ago
At least the local rental store has (edit: had) the incentive to have things people want to watch, because they're pay per view. Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them.
- eslaught 4y ago
  I don't completely get this comment, to be honest. As a matter of empirical fact, many video rental stores sucked. Your sibling comment addresses the case of Block Buster, but I remember going to our one truly independent store and not being impressed by it either. So there's that. But addressing your second point, I think we must have different viewing habits. I figure out what I want to watch, then I subscribe to it and I watch that show. If that increases my total subscriptions beyond what I'm comfortable with, I cancel the least recently used service. At no point do I use the in-service search function, so it really doesn't matter to me what else they offer. If they have one great show and a bunch of mediocre fluff, I'll watch that one show and leave. Maybe this sounds crazy, but if I'm careful about it it's not even that much more expensive then video rentals were back in the day.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them. On the contrary, their incentive is to have as much content as possible, to keep as many people subscribed as possible. Quantity instead of quality, because few really good shows/movies won't keep millions of people subscribed once they've watched them, there needs to be other content remaining.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Any video rental shop still in business today must have an excellent collection, otherwise they'd have gone the way of Blockbuster 15 years ago (they had a truly abysmal selection towards the end, as you describe. But in the glory days of VHS rental, independent rental shops often had amazing collections.)
- eslaught 4y ago
  I guess in principle I get this. But unless the store is physically huge, which seems unlikely, then it's a bit hard to imagine how an independent store would have enough selection to compete. It seems much more likely to be that the store would focus on aggressive curation. Which is to say, it would be highly dependent on both the store and your personal tastes happening to line up in order to of any value to you. That was my experience with the one truly independent store we had in town: I guess it could have been a fine store, but I wasn't in a position to tell since they very clearly did not cater to my tastes. They're gone now along with Blockbuster, so I guess the market spoke on that one.
sbf501 4y ago
I'm wrong by quite a bit (+50%), it is 80K: https://moviemadness.org/ https://moviemadness.org/ Lots of their DVDs are in sleeves in filing cabinets/boxes.