That's not true in the US. This was true in the VHS days, where home video and rental releases were separate, but in DVD and Blu-rays, there has never been a di

That's not true in the US. This was true in the VHS days, where home video and rental releases were separate, but in DVD and Blu-rays, there has never been a distinction. First sale doctrine means you can't limit what someone else does with the product. They can rent it out or resell it. However, studios would only release a limited amount of product on "home video," priced at $19.95 or whatever, versus the $89.95 or higher list price for films that were only available through distributors as "rental" copies. I remember as a kid sometimes getting the local video store to order me a copy of a tape that I would then pay full price for because it wasn't available otherwise (more often than not, this was what two VCRs were for, but I digress). That changed with DVD, where the studios stopped differentiating and went direct-to-consumer. The proliferation of DVDs without the need for a distinction between home video and rental is part of what led to the decline of video stores (in addition to the real threat, which of course was streaming) because consumers could buy their own movie collections instead of renting them for $5 for 2 nights or whatever Blockbuster used to charge. I became an avid DVD collector as a teenager in the peak DVD era (1999-2003) and a combination of unsustainable online stores (many that were dead by 2001) selling DVDs at rock-bottom prices (even during release week) and Blockbuster's lackluster selection led to me getting a Netflix account in 1999 (thanks, mom, for the credit card!) and then building my own collection of what would become thousands of titles, rather than rely on the chains. I still have a great affinity for local video stores and support my OG hometown video store (Videodrome in Atlanta) and Scarecrow Video in Seattle, b/c curation is key. Now, when the DVD boom flatlined in the late 2000s, three of the major studios refused to sell directly to Redbox until 28 days after a tentpole got a home video release because they worried about kiosk rentals cutting into their home video revenues (which at this point, had often started to overtake or match theatrical revenue), but Redbox got around that by just buying through other distributors or buying out Walmart, Best Buy and Costco stock. They also sued the studios that were refusing to sell to them directly. The reason the studios went against Redbox was because Redbox undercut them by offering rentals for $1 a day and most people (obviously not me), stopped collecting movies. But again, the first sale doctrine means that they can't require anyone to buy a different version. This is the same with book publishers. They try to strongarm libraries into buying library copies of physical books but the truth is, if a library needs a book or needs more copies, they can buy them from Amazon or a bulk distributor all the same.