Shortly after VCRs started to penetrate American households, the video rental business took off. Why? Folks have never shown any inclination to rent other forms of media rather than buying them. There’s never been a market for renting books. Never been a model for renting LPs, cassette tapes, or CDs. There’s a small market for renting video console games, I suppose.
So what was it that made Blockbuster, Netflix, and RedBox a channel for renting movies rather than other media?
Well, I probably would rent books but we have libraries for that.
I would say mostly because of the ratio of cost of buying a tape versus going to the movies at the time. The majority of people are interested in seeing most movies once rather than watching them over and over (with the exception of a few favorites). Tapes when they first came out cost much more than seeing a movie once in the theater, so the cost ratio was too high for people to want to buy them rather than rent them.
This contrasts with music, where most people are going to listen to an album many times. The cost of the album is small compared to the number of times you listen to it. In the case of books, the cost is also low, if you borrow the book from a public library or wait until it comes out in paperback.
When movies first started coming out on VHS, the pricing was fairly steep. I recall seeing price tags of $70 - $100 for a lot of movies.
Some of the early video rental stores thought it would be a good business model to buy a few copies of some of the movies and recoup their investment by renting them out at a cheaper rate.
Then some of the individual stores started affiliating with each other, and the mega chains like Blockbuster came into being.
Actually there used to be quite a market once for renting books from for-profit, privately run libraries, although I think it might have been more common to pay a membership fee than to pay for individual books. I remember my father, who was a great reader, used to patronize a place called (IIRC) Brown’s Library, as well as the local public library. (He got a lot of detective novels there.) Of course, it is long gone now. I believe commercially operated libraries were much commoner about a century or so ago. I imagine they went into decline as public libraries became more widespread and moved into supplying entertainment books as well as the educational and “improving” stuff. Also, the advent of paperbacks in the mid 20th century made it a lot cheaper to buy many books.
That’s not true. Waldenbooks, the bookstore chain, began as a chain of for-profit book rental stores during the Depression.
It had 250 stores and didn’t start to sell books until the early 1960s.
When videos first came out, they were price around $80. That was just too expensive for most people to buy. So the rental business started up. (The $80 price may have been a way for the studios to get some of the income from rentals, though it’s a chicken and egg phenomenon: The prices were high before rentals, and once rentals took off, dropping the price was believed to have cost the studios money).
Eventually, videos had a two-tiered pricing – priced to rent (around $80 retail) and priced to sell (around $25 in the beginning, but dropping to about $15).
When DVDs came out, most studios wanted to stick with the same pricing model. Someone (I don’t recall the name) convinced them it was smarted to price everything to sell.
There is a HUGE market for renting books; it’s called a library.
Now, I own about 5,000 books, and there’s no room for any more, so I go to the library.
Movies, same thing. Except if I really love a book, I am way apt to reread it, or reread parts of it. A movie, not so much.
And there are a lot of movies (and books) where once is plenty enough. (Even good ones.)
It did not take many VCRs to fill up my shelf, at all. CDs are a little better. But, basically, I want to watch it once.
What I don’t understand is why it took so damn long to get rentable clothes for women’s special occasions (i.e., Rent the Runway). And where are the rentable clothes for the much longer-lasting special occasion for women, to wit: pregnancy? There’s a market there.
Others have already pointed out that videotapes were expensive in the early days. Also, I can remember when schools, etc. would rent movies on those big 16mm reels to show. And, heck, movie theaters didn’t own the copies of the movies they showed. Movies have had a long history as something that it was impractical to own your own copies of, unlike books or music.
Most libraries also lend LPs, cassette tapes, and CDs in addition to books. In the absence of free public libraries, we would most likely see for-profit libraries renting out these media as well.
For many people, renting (at a fraction of the purchase price) rather than ownership is preferable for all sorts of things that are no longer desirable, but which are still useful, after being “consumed.” Videos, music, books, specialized tools - these are all things that many people only want to use once, and have no need to possess long-term.
I did not know that. Interesting!
Why rent movies, now, in 2010? I felt like seeing some movies last night, and thought a trip to the local video place was in order. My husband went through the viewed DVDs for sale, and I rented some movies. He will collect DVDs like I collect music, but I just want to watch the movie once, and return it.
But with so many other methods, legal or not, of obtaining digital media, how long will Blockbuster, etc. last?
We also stopped at the library, borrowing (renting) books, movies, a magazine, 2 cds, and I could have also borrowed a game for our Wii.
Hell, its not just the videos that were expensive - the VCRs were insanely expensive (and unwieldy monsters to boot).
When I was a kid, a video rental place opened up. We rented not only the movies, but the VCR as well because we couldn’t afford the MANY hundreds of dollars the machine cost.
IIRC, the movies were about a dollar, and the VCR was ten dollars for 2 or 3 days. We would rent like 5 movies and spend a weekend watching them. Not very often, this was a treat my mother would splurge on if me and my brother had been especially good (i.e., REALLY not that often!).
This was the early eighties.
Maybe I’m missing something. Do other Public Libraries not let you check out DVDs? In fact, with the WB delay on Netflix, I sometimes get movies at the library that aren’t available on Netflix yet.
I think the nature of reading and listening to music contributes to the difference - as mentioned albums are typically listened to more than once, but even if you read a book once that potentially is a week long or more engagement. If you are watching a movie only once that is a few hours at the most. To me, this gives books and music a sense of permanence that meshes well with ownership, and movies a sense of fleetingness that meshes well with rental.
The cost-to-use ratio also has an effect, and it doesn’t surprise me that book rentals were once more common, when books were relatively much more expensive. But now books are cheap, and I’ll get many days use out of them (in addition to decorating the house through book shelves, making me look more sophisticated :)). Music is the same, a $10 CD gets months or years of usage.
For a movie, right now the rental services are so convenient that even movies I love and watch multiple times are better rented. Within a few days Netflix will deliver anything I can think of (instantly if it is available on streaming). Owning is just not cost effective.
I’m pretty sure that most libraries do at this point, but the selection is wildly variable. In my experience, most still have smaller and older selections than the local Blockbuster, and skew more towards classics and BBC dramas then new releases. It makes sense, if you think about it - libraries are working with limited budgets and devote the largest chunk of that to books. They need to be pickier.
On the other hand, the selection at your local Blockbuster seems to be shrinking, as online subscription services become popular, and the to-buy and video game sections keep expanding. The libraries might eventually catch up anyway.
An “ultra low budget” Hollywood movie costs $5,000,000 to make.
An album costs a few thousand to record.
A book is essentially free to write.
Movies simply have to earn more money in order to make sense.
At one time, a book represented a substantial portion of a day’s wages. So in the 1700s there were a number of for-profit libraries: Ben Franklin set one up for example. The first public library was only established in 1833, though certain philanthropists had set up free libraries as early as the 1600s.
Why BUY movies? I look at my collection of DVDs, and sigh at the amount of money absolutely thrown away on them. It’s a practice I really regret - I have a Netflix account now, and watch way more movies on a MUCH lower budget than I ever did. And most of my DVD library is available on Watch Instantly, so it’s not like I have to wait to see anything I want to from my previous “collection”.
I’d much rather put that money into the equipment I watch it on now. An upgraded TV, receiver and speakers is a much better return on enjoyment for me.
Some libraries even do renting of books. Our local library has a new program, where the newest best-sellers are available, but for rental rather than check-out, and for a very short period.
I don’t think the “library beating the Netflix to release” part is remotely true.
An album costs a few thousand? Well, maybe today with computers, but you haven’t talked to the likes of Pink Floyd! And with modern bands, there’s the advances to cover videos, etc…I think your math may be a little off…
