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An Ode to Blockbuster and Other [Video Rental Stores]
Posts
I'm glad Netflix is keeping that tradition alive.
My grandmother (whom I've established here previously as a crazy person) would frequently rent those movies and tell people she saw the real version. The thing is, she didn't think she was lying. She legitimately thought she was, like, the smartest person in town who had some inside track on these new movies in collusion with her local video store and had pulled one over on all the movie theaters.
"Oh, Harry Potter? Yeah, I saw that the other night at home."
"No, you rented 'Jerry's Wizard School.'"
"And . . . ?"
I almost got got by Paranormal Entity.
Ah, mockbusters.
In the late 80's the video game companies, spearheaded by Nintendo joined forces with whatever the US PC software association was and decided to sue practically the entire rental industry in the US.
The software side settled with the rental companies (who weren't making much off of PC software rentals anyways as only pirates rented PC software if they even had it at all) leaving the video game people in a lurch and the court decided that much like VHS tapes the decade before they could be rented just like anything else.
This case took years and years to wind its way through the courts and when it was finally all done with in the mid 90's they decided a slightly spiteful tact; the manuals were after all property of the video game companies and could not be duplicated without their consent, so they sued the rental companies for copyright infringement. Pretty much everyone settled or voluntarily started to either not pack a photocopy of the manual or come up with their own instruction sheets.
Back in the SNES era I was a kid who only actually got to buy one or two games per year (usually christmas time) and who loved RPGs. So I played all the classics by renting them.
I would actually write down the barcode of the cartridge and then ask for that one when renting it.
Memory cards where a godsend.
The flip side of that was getting to see just how bad ass you would be during the end game, without putting in 30 hours first.
Dooooommmmm!!!
I'm pretty sure that Blockbuster had to pay extra for their copies for licensing reasons.
If he was going to go through all that work anyway, wouldn't it have just been easier for him to just outright steal them?
Doing it his way he would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids.
Yeah, when I was working there, rental DVDs cost about £50 each due to the license.
Decide on the next line by the rhyme when I choose it.
Also I put songs on YouTube
The musings of this lonely rube.
I made a thread once. It didn't end well for me.
haha this is around the time they tried to sue Game Genie too.
i do not remember those at all. but in the late 80s/early 90s my family only went to the mom and pops because Blockbuster had some pretty stringent membership requirements. We didn't start going there until the late or mid 90s so I guess I missed that.
I guess movies sometimes appear On Demand slightly faster than sale and Redbox, but the cost of one of those movies in HD is fucking obscene. It's especially bad now that I use DirecTV, because ordering a movie "On Demand" isn't even immediate. I need to wait a good 30 minutes to let it buffer enough to watch the film without having to pause in the middle. So I'm paying $7 so I can wait longer than going to a Redbox kiosk.
I make tweet.
I assume people are paying what they're demanding, which is why they keep demanding it, I just don't understand the reasoning.
Like, "I really want to see this movie right now! Except I didn't give that much of a shit when it was in theaters a month ago. But I give enough of a shit that I can't wait another month until I can get it for 20% of the price!" It just seems like something of a niche demographic.
Maybe part of the appeal is that you're not actually paying for it, you're just throwing it onto your future cable bill, which you probably handle with auto-pay anyway, so it doesn't really count. Kinda like you're not really paying $2000 for that $500 TV you just dropped on your credit card that you will make minimum payments on for the next five years.
I make tweet.
Some people also cannot stand seeing a movie in the cinema filled with talking people, or don't want to get a babysitter, or a million other reasons why renting it at home makes sense.
Last summer, Bernie was still at the end of its theatrical run but hard to find, not yet out for rental, and I could get it from PSN for $3.99 in HD. Divided across the other people watching it with me, the hypothetical cost became $1.33 per person, which is pretty reasonable.
I think I've used On Demand twice in six years.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714203/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2246549/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5
It's a real movie that got a theatrical release and everything.
Oh, Hell no. This will happen over my bullet-ridden corpse.
My first real job that I held down for more than a year was at a Chapters, and Goddamn that place was amazing to work for. They let me get away with being the most irresponsible sack of shit for a loooong time before I finally screwed-up so badly (showed-up, repeatedly, an hour or so late for my shift) they had to terminate me. I wish I'd got that job later in life rather than when I was a shithead teenager.
I still go to bookstores and buy books for the cover price rather than going to Wal Mart or wherever to get the same thing for 10 bucks. Why? Because I buy my books at a book store. A place for books.
My brother and I used to use On Demand all of the time because the cable company made it stupidly easy to use (You literally just scrolled in the TV guide menu to 'On Demand', accepted the terms/conditions, and boom. You're watching the movie) and it was also stupidly easy, for a while, to abuse the system. You just called in whenever you got the bill and said, "Hey, we don't remember watching Sin City," and they'd just take the charge off. They changed the way it worked after a few months (you had to actually phone in and do whatever other bullshit), go figure, so we stopped.
I've seen my mother do this when she has guests over and no one can find a film they want to watch on netflix. So their time ends up being limited and there is something that is available on demand that isn't on the ol' Netflix. While the nearest RedBox is only about 10 minutes away sometimes a host doesn't want to pile everyone into the car for various reasons to tap-tap-tap on a screen while hoping to find the thing they wanted (hey you can check redbox inventories online btw)
so
Limited time + Lack of availability = Higher costs
It's also easy because you're not sliding your card or dropping cash right now... the charge comes on your bill, so you can justify it by not spending money on the rental right now, even though it's effectively the same (and more expensive).
Who's the mom there?
I've had that thought every single time someone mentioned a Mom & Pop without explicitly indicating a male and female pair.
Thank you for being my voice.
I remember someone mentioning paying money for porn at one point and I walked over and was like "What? The internet exists. Do you not understand how free porn is?".
...I sort-of wonder sometimes about how much damage this ultimately did to the movie rental business. I mean, it must have been pretty substantial; part of Blockbuster's core revenue, once upon a time, was built on renting-out adult movies while they had (basically) a monopoly over that sector.
The Internet porn scene must've rattled quite a few rental places at their center.
Rutger Hauer movies set in a post-apocalyptic landscape that was suspiciously empty of anything that cost money looked amazing before you actually saw it. Gene Hackman's run of not great light action movies that nevertheless had the virtue of Gene Hackman as the star. The inexplicably large number of films starring Shannon Tweed, all of which had two word titles that could be swapped around without anyone noticing. The films of Terence Hill and Bud White, which you watched because you knew there'd be a twenty minute punch up at the end more inventive and funny than any other movie could manage. These were films that you knew would never make it to one of the four TV channels and which had bypassed your local cinema entirely, or been out and forgotten before VHS was even invented. Many were the nights I would put on something I'd barely heard of but which, for example, looked kinda like an Indiana Jones movie only to discover I was watching The Armour Of God and my God was this the guy from the Cannonball Run HE IS AMAZING.
Oh, there was one other thing that might get you to rent out a video. The trailers at the start of the last video you'd watched. I loved these more than I can say. Theglory days of the deep-voiced trailer guys, a slow pan up the shiny body of someone like Dolph Lundgren, a brief shot of a woman possibly taking her top off that signalled that at some point in the movie you'd see a nekkid ladee. The simply joys of youth.
We only got rid of our VHS player a couple of years ago, at the same time I managed to offload a couple of hundred VHS cassettes on to a charity store. They were taking up a lot of space and I haven't missed them since. I've also almost entirely stopped buying film DVDs, only picking up TV show boxsets or favourite films priced so cheaply it qualifies as an impulse buy. I've started thinning out my DVD collection as well, getting rid of about fifty or so in the last six months. Physical media. She dying.
Eventually, "Encore Entertainment" shut down and was replaced by a Hollywood Video. Hated it. My big problem with Hollywood video is how they wanted to showcase the covers, rather than mostly showcasing titles. That meant much less videos per section. And it was even worse when you basically had an entire wall dedicated to new copies of "Mr. Deeds." We there really 50 people renting that movie on the same weekend? Really?
Eventually a Blockbuster appeared across the street. Hollywood video shut down, and was replaced by a bunch of smaller stores. Blockbuster shut down and was replaced by a bank. By then, I had already moved on to Netflix.
In regards to video games, I think one of the biggest changes is that gamers became a lot older and more affluent. When video games first game out, they were mainly a kids thing, and kids didn't have much money, which means that they couldn't afford to buy the games which means that they had to rent. But then that same generation grew up and got jobs, where they had he money to own.
In regards to On Demand, I think a big issue is "The Paradox of Choice." When people have a virtually unlimited number of options, they have a hard time narrowing down. I think one of the ideas of "On Demand" is that it limits your available options, which makes it less daunting.
Oh, and I'm amazed that we haven't really discussed the annoyance of macrovision.
Guess I'll have to stop by this afternoon and see what I can pick up on the cheap.
Then a drunk driver smashed through the storefront and took out their computers/records.
We still have those DVDs.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
We would set up systems and play Madden games during work hours. Have Halo LAN parties that listed till 2am after closing. Gave out free rentals in exchange for food from the food places around us. Eat free snacks.
I remember going to the video store with my dad and then not being able to find him for a while. It wasn't until I got much older that I realized he was disappearing into the 'back room' and what that actually meant.
So, with regards to renting games and photocopied manuals, a big part of that lawsuit was about PC games. If anyone recalls, at the time copy protection for PC games was usually 'on page XX of the manual, what is the fifth word'? That right there killed the PC rental market, there were a few places around me that would rent out some PC games until that suit went through.
With reference to the above, I remember sitting there and copying by hand some of the 'copy protection' sheets so I could play my pirated games. I don't think anyone ever rented PC games except to pirate them. I remember one of the games was a mid-90's driver / shooter where you drove a cab around some 'Escape from New York' style city, and raised money to buy better guns, etc. Can't remember the name.
In High School, one of my friends was working in a small mom & pop video store that got no traffic at all. He would sit all day and play Playstation / N64 games and ring up the half dozen customers that came in. I'd go and hang out there for hours just playing games, taking them off the rack when we wanted to play something else, etc. It seemed like the best job in the world, of course the place eventually went under.
The last time I had anything to do with Blockbuster was in college, when I rented Mario Party, and the friend that was supposed to return it before they went home for Christmas forgot. I ended up getting a bill, but when I told them I dropped it off and it must be their fault they dropped the charges.
Aside from kid movies / TV shows for my daughter, it's been a long ass time since I've rented or bought any movies. After getting burned on a decent sized VHS collection, and a huge music collection that I never use, I just don't buy much media anymore. Seems like a waste to buy something that's going to be obsolete in a few years anyway. I don't know how many DVD's we've got that haven't even been opened or watched once.
I'll one-up here, one of my friends would rent an SNES and game and keep them till they completed it. And I'm talking stuff like RPGs and Lemmings.
I think we finally managed to convince his dad to just buy a damn core set so they could save money and not have to worry about a deposit.
Wow. I don't know if I've ever laid eyes on either in the wild.