But if those are 200 recent releases, that’s what most people want to rent.
Generally Redbox is 20% recent films, 10% classics, and 70% low budget garbage. Once you get past the first page of 10 movies you immediately see all the straight-to-video movies nobody has ever heard of which dominates the list from then on. From what I understand low budget studios pay for RedBox to stock these movies under the idea people who come to rent a “Brand New” movie but see it’s out might rent one of these instead.
I am seeing loads more of these garbage movies on Amazon and Netflix too (but especially Amazon).
Amazon seems to be going for direct-to-video “B” movies while Netflix is going for eastern European shows.
This is an under-appreciated issue with physical DVD rental places like Blockbuster; if you wanted to watch the entire series of a popular TV show (Say, The Sopranos or The Wire or or The Simpsons or South Park), you’d find the video rental place had divided the boxed set into individual DVDs and while there might be five or six discs in the set, the store only had discs 1,2, and 4 because the others had been rented out.
There was no easily solution to that, short of the video place buying multiple copies of a season, which was fine when everyone wanted to see the latest series but not much good when everyone had moved on and no longer cared about renting the first series of Family Guy anymore.
Sure Netflix etc have an issue where you might only get the first series or two from a show with more than that (or sometimes, later serieses but not the earlier ones) but at least all the episodes will be there.
Sometimes something similar happens with streaming too. I rewatched LA Law on a streaming service , and every season was missing a few episodes,
Really? I’m jealous 
That’s one of those shows that seems to be a unicorn in the land of streaming, at least at the present time. As far as I can tell, it isn’t available on any of the major streamers, not even Peacock even though it was. on NBC back in the day. Same thing with Northern Exposure (not available on Paramount or any others AFAICT). I think it has something to do with music rights, but it still sucks that some classics aren’t available at all. I’m guessing the missing episodes were the ones with music rights issues, and the streamer decided that rather than having incomplete seasons, they would just stop streaming it.
Amazon gives me the impression that they’re highlighting the cheaper (to them) content when you’re searching or browsing. I always get a B-movie vibe from them.
Netflix is a little harder to pin down. They do offer a lot of non-American shows (European, Israeli, etc.). I’m liking that quite a lot, some of them are very good and it’s nice to have a different flavor once in a while (I’m a sucker for police or law procedurals from unfamiliar countries).
It’s still streaming on IMDB TV , which I have through Amazon Prime.I’m sure episodes are still missing.
The rise and fall, as represented in locations
Looks like the peak was 2004.
Per this Biz insider video, Blockbuster walked away from the first major video on demand service in 2001, which they built with… wait for it… Enron. I’ve read the Blockbuster story before, but missed this point!
In 2000 Blockbuster could have purchased Netflix for $50 million, but laughed them out of the room. The franchise owners themselves also pushed back on a bunch of stuff like reduced late fees and online video, and management was very short sighted about everything online. Overall, it’s a long series of strategic mistakes from an entrenched incumbent.
And the last rental from a corporate owned blockbuster was… This Is The End:
(The Bend, Oregon store in the news as “the last Blockbuster” was a franchise operator, which also shows the power that franchise owners had over the org!)
People always mention this like Blockbuster lost out on millions-if not billions of dollars in revenue. But that always assumes they would been able to manage Netflix to have the same level of success they had on their own —which judging by Blockbuster’s track record of how they tried to compete with Netflix–I think it is good chance Blockbuster would failed entirely and a different company would be in the place Netflix is now.
And remember that this was the old DVD-by-mail Netflix service. The big advantages it had over Blockbuster stores were no late fees and a really deep catalog. There’s no certainty that a Blockbuster-Netflix combination would have ever pursued streaming video (which came much later).
Oh, yeah. I read the Enron book, and their foray into streaming comes up.
I thought Netflix always had streaming in their long-term plan. But yeah, if they had been bought by Blockbuster, that plan might have been trashed.
that was pretty much most blockbuster s …the ones here were considered easy because all they had to do is stock the new and the video game shelves …no one really ventured in the middle asiles much… they even had a “classics” section with popular older titles not far from the new shelves
Although if anyone remembers HBO and the like back in the day when they’d get t2 or 3 quality movies a month and the rest would be drive-in trash or movies like “deadly friend” or legend of Billie Jean (actually dad had HBO so early I can remember when they went off air from about 1 to 8 am the next day)
I also remember when hbo and cinemax finally was able to show star wars in 86 or 7 … they hyped it for months ahead of time …
Deadly Friend was not garbage. It redefined what you can do with a basketball.
Also one of the great things about blockbuster is when a new movie came out, blockbuster would have 50 or more copies. The local video store had 1-3 copies and it took forever to get one.
Continuing from 4 months ago, the hole in the wall place I went to in NJ had more choices and also quirkier choices than Blockbuster. And it was locally owned, which was cool.
I don’t feel the choice paradox when dealing with the Netflix DVD queue, since you can add a whole bunch of things at once and “pay” (in the sense of devoting time to watching them) much later. And no choice when the DVD is sitting by your TV saying “watch me.”
The pricing structures described above look similar to the charges for renting removal boxes.
I was involved with moving the hospital where I worked and we rented 1000 plastic crates for packing smaller items. The charge per crate for a one-month rental was quite low but simply continued for any that were not returned on time.
After the move, we were around 200 boxes missing and of course, I got an invoice a month later. I managed to track a few down, hidden in storerooms and being used for other purposes, but ended up having to buy over 100 that had vanished entirely - presumably people had taken them home.
I worked at a Mom and Pop store that eventually went out of business when a BB moved in down the road. “Pop” died before this happened, and poor “Mom” (a very sweet 65 year old lady) resorted to opening an adult video section in the store to stay afloat long enough to divest the store before she lost everything. Part of my job was to pick the titles - we’d literally have a guy back his car up to the rear door (no pun intended) and I’d shop from a trunkful of videos.
The amount of cost overhead of maintaining physical inventory was unsustainable for BB. As others mentioned, you’d have to purchase many multiple copies of first rate movies that six months later were worthless because the demand would tail off. I don’t even know how Mom and Pop stayed afloat for so long, other than they were one of a few small shops in a reasonably sized town and pretty much worked the store themselves as a retirement hobby (I was one of two high school students that covered nights). They’d pay approx. $75-$95 per copy of a hit movie, and rent it for $2.85 for two nights. For some titles, they had a leasing agreement with a distributor (I think they were called “RenTrak”) so they could obtain multiple titles. We either had 2-3 copies of a new movie that was purchased, or 10-15 if they were leased. The store took in maybe $200 gross each week day, and $400-$500 on Friday/Saturday.
In short, I don’t know if the economics of a brick and mortar model were ever possible at scale.
The oldest video store in Little Rock opened in 1977 and is still in business though the owner is looking to sell the building and retire. But it’s adapted over the years and I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s just a video store. They selling vaping stuff, adult toys, and there’s an adult arcade on the second floor. I went there once in 2019 but there was nothing of interest for me and I thought the place was a bit skeevy.
I remember going to mom and pop video rental places before Blockbuster started swallowing them whole. And I just checked Google Maps and the one in Texas is a Shaolin Kick-Boxing school now. Wow. This place was in business for several years so it must have been a viable business model at one time. There were certainly other video rental places as well.
I was just going to post that we still had a local mom-and-pop video store, but Google is telling me they closed in May of last year – a casualty of the pandemic, I’m sure. Shows how out of the loop I have been.
There’s another local “video” store that’s still in business but they also have a couple of pool tables, an arcade room, and sell all manner of vapes and kratom and similar junk. They share a building with a used car lot. I suspect video rentals are a tiny fraction of their sales.
There’s also an adult shop that rents videos, has an arcade, sells the usual toys and magazines, and I have no clue how they manage to stay in business.
We had a Hollywood Video and a Blockbuster in town. The building Hollywood Video was in is now a Red Cross blood bank and the Blockbuster building is now a pet store.
I never understood the lure of Netflix’s DVD rental service. I don’t know what I might want to watch on Friday or Saturday night. I don’t know if we are even watching movies Friday and Saturday. When I decide I want a movie, I would have went to Blockbuster and rented it. The Netflix thing never appealed to me.