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'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming
- vodou 2y agoI don't miss physical media. Streaming works fine from a technical perspective. What I DO miss is the huge supply of films from all eras, forgotten gems, B-movies, etc. In my part of the world we had Lovefilm where I got rentals delivered by post. I guess this was the same kind of service Netflix had in the US. The number of titles were just incredible. The number of films I can access today is just a tiny fraction of that. That really is a shame.
- bazil376 2y agoI do miss it a bit. Something about the scarcity made it more special. Also, the ceremony of going to the video store, browsing the shelves, and bringing it home. Same applies to music for me, but maybe even more so. I know I’m wearing rose-colored glasses in a lot of ways, but im okay with it.
- Macha 2y agoAlso when people had fewer shows they spent more time watching extras and since studios knew that they put effort into making them. Nowadays a lot of projects don't bother or do the bare minimum of grabbing two actors on a zoom call for a commentary track.
- ghaff 2y agoA lot of commentaries were crap but I really enjoyed some of them and, in a streaming world (whether subscription or a la carte), it really doesn't make sense to devote any resources at all to making them for the handful of people who buy DVDs or even own a DVD player.
- nusl 2y agoI enjoy physical media but not the finding space for it part. Somehow stuff accumulates over time and if you've got 100 DVDs it is a lot of space that you may not actively be using. That being said, I don't have a huge living space so that would contribute.
- goosedragons 2y agoYou can condense a lot of it down if you use CD/DVD wallets. You can fit 100 DVDs in the same space as like 3 or 4 standard DVD cases.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoHaven't magnetic drives (maybe even tapes ??) been a better option for at least a decade ? (And transistor storage (aka USB keys) for quickly moving a few files around.)
- nusl 2y agoYeah, though the wallets remove half the fun for me. It's nice having the boxes on display rather than stuck into a wallet.
- demondemidi 2y agoAsk yourself if you really need 100s of dvds? Are you gonna rewatch all the avengers that many times?
- mdp2021 2y ago> Are you gonna rewatch all the No, but you are probably going to rewatch Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" or Foley's "Glengarry Glen Ross" or (etc.) that many times. And you may like to also have their physical token.
- demondemidi 2y agoSurprised you didn’t throw My Dinner with Andre in your attempt at sounding sophisticated.
- sn41 2y agoRental stores were great, except for the late fees. Many local rentals had good collections of older movies and TV series. They are simply non-existent in the streaming world.
- nasmorn 2y agoThat is actually one of the big surprises of digital media for me. How much is not available for paying customers.
- ghaff 2y agoMany things are available a la carte. But the all you can eat streaming services are not great if you're looking for something specific in general.
- dirtyhippiefree 2y agoEven libraries have dropped late fees, but YMMV…
- wiredfool 2y agoI loved Scarecrow Video in Seattle when I was in the U district.
- djbusby 2y agoSome folks in here complaining about late fees but Scarecrow has them beat! Some media there you have to put a large deposit to rent - and it's got late fees too! Love that place.
- daveoc64 2y agoI live in Bristol, so I'm not far from 20th Century Flicks (featured in the article). They have some things I'd like to rent (and that are hard to find elsewhere), but ultimately I'm still put off by the prospect of having to pay late fees!
- mauvehaus 2y agoInquiring minds want to know: does their sign take advantage of the FLICKS/FUCKS ambiguity with the right font, and if so is this wordplay on 20th Century Fox?
- daveoc64 2y agoYou can see their logo on their website - https://www.20thcenturyflicks.co.uk/ https://www.20thcenturyflicks.co.uk/ There is also Street View - https://maps.app.goo.gl/SiJXmz8wYWaN9KNC8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/SiJXmz8wYWaN9KNC8
- demondemidi 2y agoLong live https://moviemadness.org/ https://moviemadness.org/ All of the movies, none of the bullshit of streaming. I watch about two to three movies a week, that’s all my TV time. Two weekend trips a month to MM takes care of all my video needs. I guess I’m missing out on streaming specific content, but I don’t care.
- aldarisbm 2y agoI have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me. Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Regardless, I could not stop thinking how having physical media would avoid these drops.
- everforward 2y agoEh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches. I find it roughly equal as things go. The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer. That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while. The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.
- Macha 2y agoI remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length). But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive. Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time. Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.
- mu53 2y agoOne of the things that I will miss about physical medium is the permanence of the data. A famous movie from 2006 had a racist joke. I remember it very clearly because of an argument at the time with my friends watching it. In 2021, I bought the movie on google. I looked for clips, but I couldn't find a copy of that racist joke. Its as if it never happened. No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment. While its not bad in this instance, its just a comedian trying to protect their image. The possibilities in the future are not fun.
- adzm 2y ago> No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment. well, what was the movie?
- criddell 2y agoIt could have been Shazaam starring Sinbad as a genie who grants wishes to a couple of kids.
- parpfish 2y agoNo, I think you’re thinking of Kazaam, the one where Sinbad was a genie
- Integrape 2y agoMaybe Clerks 2, when Randall was "taking it back".
- dpritchett 2y agoI’d guess Click: https://screencrush.com/rob-schneiders-racist-stereotyped-characters/ https://screencrush.com/rob-schneiders-racist-stereotyped-ch...
- NiloCK 2y agoAt the rate that Suno, Sora, etc are advancing, there won't even be a deliberate editorial act to report on. All streaming media content could pass through a newspeak software layer for JIT censorship that propagates the values of whoever owns the service.
- subpixel 2y agoThis article [0] touches on it but it was unforgettable to wander around a NYC video rental store in the early 90s _with the whole neighborhood_. [0] https://ilovetheupperwestside.com/be-kind-rewind-the-days-of-video-rental-shops-on-the-uws/ https://ilovetheupperwestside.com/be-kind-rewind-the-days-of...
- triceratops 2y agoDVDs are great. The only downside is the obnoxious trailers and loading screens they make you sit through. Often I can start playing a movie on Netflix faster than when I possess a physical copy of that media. Which is crazy when you think about it.
- basisword 2y agoAs physical media has been replaced with digital I've come to miss those walls filled with books, videos, and records. Stores (and homes) seem much more sanitised without them. You could tell a lot about a person from a glance at the various media items displayed in their home. Given there are a lot of people who buy vinyl records that don't own a record player, it seems this feeling is common.
- rvense 2y agoI always joke that I'm from an in-between generation in that I'm quite digital but still attached to stuff... I do genuinely cherish the bad AVI rips of the Simpsons and X-Files I got off Pirate Bay in 2008.
- rainbowzootsuit 2y agoDo you have them well cataloged in zip up DVD binders?
- felixg3 2y agoThere was usually a 700mb version available of films and one which was made for two disks. The quality difference was crazy!
- everforward 2y agoI think this still exists, as the items that filled the space the books took. Eg the younger D&D folks I know fill their bookshelves with minis and action figures instead of adventure guides. It does seem diminished, though I wonder how much of that is being converted to digital and how much is “the average person is too poor for a personal library now”.
- grishka 2y agoThat and also the physicality of the process of playing that media. Opening a file or a stream just doesn't feel the same as taking a cassette or a disc out of its box and inserting it into the player. Vinyl records take that aspect to the extreme because the songs themselves are visible on the surface of the record and you yourself put the needle next to the song you want to play.
- jackvalentine 2y agoI borrow DVDs from the library. Great selection.
- dirtyhippiefree 2y agoSome areas of the country have multiple counties with unbelievable selection between all the branches!
- JKCalhoun 2y agoThe library selection in Omaha, Nebraska is definitely lacking in both old films and foreign films. They have a handful of these titles, but I am always looking for stuff they don't have. Blockbuster of course was even worse in that department though (and RedBox is essentially worthless).
- l72 2y agoFor foreign films, you might check out your local university. I've found many of the foreign language departments have a fairly decent dvd/blu-ray library that students can check out. I know alumni usually have access to the libraries too, and if you aren't either, I've found some will work with local libraries for inter-library loans.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoThank you. Indeed UNO has a great film collection but I am neither a student nor alum. I will see about the interlibrary loan though.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoI loved my video store, $1 for a day. Not a binge watcher, so this was good enough for me.