I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic

I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic movies and other odd-ball tapes. During my time, there was a fair bit of the 'helpful advice' this article focuses on, but I think the bigger loss is due to licensing. At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could. The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors. Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream. There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media. I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.