I say yes, and would say within 5 years, as more and more people get digital cable, and other such advances render them obsolete. Am I missing any reason why they will continue to thrive?
And, to hijack my OP, with Tower Records closing, will there be music only stores in a few years, or just Best Buy and Wal Mart type outlets?
Maybe. All the family owned ones in my neighborhood closed many years (like 10) ago due to 2 Blockbusters (about a mile from eachother) and a Hollywood video. Just recently one of the Blockbusters closed and it’s not “99 Cent Videos”.
I’ve been a Netflix customer for 5 yrs and haven’t been in a video store all that time.
Well, that’ll suck. I don’t have cable and have no intentions of getting it. I don’t like it. I also don’t have Netflix, preferring to go to the movie store and look at things and browse a bit.
If this trend continues, no one will ever leave their house! Nuh-uh. I will do my personal best to keep video stores open. Anyway, judging by the amount of people there on a typical Friday, I don’t think it’s imminent.
Many.[ol][li]Not everyone wants/can afford digital cable, so looking to it as a replacement doesn’t make sense.[/li][li]Not everyone rents movies often enough to justify monthly fees from services like NetFlix.[/li][li]Video rental stores provide services beyond just renting out movies. They also rent video games, sell used (“pre-viewed”) movies and games and sell movie snacks (popcorn and the like) to go with movies. None of these services can be provided through digital cable or satellite services.[/li][li]Some people just prefer to do things in person. Rather than rent movies over the internet, these people prefer to go to an actual building and browse through actual movies, looking for something that strikes them as interesting.[/li][/ol]
There are probably more reasons that I’m forgetting for the continued existance of such businesses. I don’t think that video rental stores are likely to vanish any time soon.
Now music stores may close. Because it’s just not worth it to buy a $17 CD when you can get the 4 songs you want legally off iTunes for $0.99 each.
I think the suburban stand alone ones are on the way out, probably within 5 years.
However, remember that Kroger now has DVD rental kiosks. I think you’ll see more of these. I could see something like this at convenience stores as well.
I think the traditional video store might be headed the way of the dodo, but I could see a large version of the Redbox, with a wider selection, sticking around. I mean, I’m a Blockbuster Online customer, and i still use the Redbox a few times a month. Sometimes you just want to grab a movie on impulse, and the box is cheap and convenient.
I like going to video stores, mostly because when I want to see a movie I want to see it now. And unless it’s playing on PVP that’s the only way to get it.
I wonder this myself.
I never thought that Netflix would kill the video store. The experience is just too different.
However, if they ever make available a large catalog of movies that you can search and view through your TV, I imagine that’s it for video stores.
Maybe I’m being too “trunk-centric” but while I like my local Mom & Pop video store, I only go there because I don’t do Netflix, and I like going there more than Blockbuster. But, if I could browse titles through my TV there would be nothing keeping me going to the video store.
The question (as far as I’m concerned) will be whether there are enough people who don’t have cable/satellite to keep the brick & mortar stores running. Already, if something is playing PPV at a time I like, I’ll get it instead of going to the store. Fortunately for my video store, DishNetwork’s PPV selection is pretty pathetic.
Also, IIRC current legislation (?) requires a 50 day or so lag time before a movie released on video goes to PPV. If this is the case, and this ever changes, I think that will be a huge blow to video stores.
A couple other things to consider:
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DVD’s are relatively cheap. You can usually pick up a new release for under $20.00 and older films for a lot less. You can buy them at a lot of places.
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I suspect that public libraries will continue to rent/check out DVDs for the forseable future
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Big box stores can continue to sell CDs because the person is likely to see other things in the store as well. They had the advantage over a place like Tower Records, who carried a larger selection, but lost too many sales of the latest hits to discounted CDs at Big Box stores
I think that it could be the end of ‘box’ rental places such as Blockbuster, but not the off-beat, indie-type rental places.
Blockbuster offers me nothing that I can’t find on Netflicks, or available for purchase online. Their shelves and collections are uninspiring, with mostly blockbusters (heh) and popular films from the last few years, with a few ‘classics’ in a select number of genres.
I go to two local rental places all the time. One has a huge and diverse selection, with movies organized in interesting ways (some are by director, for example). It can be slightly confusing if you want to find something specific (but you can always just ask), but often leads me to movies I haven’t heard of or might not have thought to rent. I’ve never tried to rent a movie that they didn’t have.
The other I like is much smaller, but they have a great display for documentaries (and are always getting new ones), as well as for classic horror.
When I want to be inspired or to find something new and exciting, and to browse in the moment (what will I watch tonight?), local rental places with good selection and service are still the way to go, IMHO.
At DVD rental prices of fifty cents to $2.50 for five nights, the rental is stil the best deal at the local rental store. I don’t foresee high speed internet access for anybody outside the city limits in my area in the next few years. Satelite will never be an affordable solution at the rates they charge compared to what I spend in rentals. Satelite is full of the same old 40 movies played over and over anyhow, and a one viewing rental is way more expensive than the local DVD rental store. The new video rental store in town is busy every time I go in with people renting, so they currently are doing well.
The technology is changing so fast the future of video distribution basically cannot be reasonably predicted. Media as we know it (DVDs and CDs) is going to die is an amazingly short period of time. What is going to replace it is the trillion dollar question.
Take flash memory. 4Gb thumb drives are now commodity items. That’s about a DVD’s worth of video. Samsung recently had two interesting announcements. They’ll start shipping chips for 32Gb flash drives early next year. They also have a new flash memory tech that’s denser and faster that will come out in a couple years. That’s going to be the same or better than Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.
As to the format “war” regarding the latter: It’s the Battle of New Orleans all over again. Who wins won’t matter.
Thumb drives are an interesting way to transport and use video. Small, no spinning etc. Many HDTVs have USB ports already (but mainly for things like pictures-for now). Certainly desktops and laptops do.
But note that thumb drives are re-writable.
So think like a Blockbuster. Wire up each store with an Internet connection that even broadband consumers can’t imagine. The customer walks in, plugs their thumb drive into a kiosk. Orders and downloads their movie. The “new” movies are of course cached locally but there are the weirdos like us who want to order foreign films and such. Make all the customers happy.
Then you can forget about people returning the videos, what to do with old stock, being sold out, etc.
While the studios would be worried about people renting movies forever, keep in mind, that most people would just overwrite the movie with the next one. If Blu-ray and HD-DVD recorders never take off, where are people going to store a large number of 40Gb movies? (Of course, the MPAA will shoot itself in the foot with time-out DRM, but that’s another version of dystopia.)
But then, why should Blockbuster have the kiosks? Why not WalMart or 7-11s?
And that’s assuming that people like going to places and downloading movies onto their thumbdrives, etc. Most Americans don’t care about video quality much. (Look how long VHS lived.) A “good” quality video of a movie takes less than 1Gb. Not too long to download over broadband. That’s the future Comcast and such are drooling about.
My guess: standalone video stores are deader than doornails. There is a window of opportunity in which Blockbuster can leverage its brand id into becoming equated with the next generation video distribution system. But I don’t think the odds are good.
(All in all, you can be sure Bill Gates will make more money. MS will force their crappy codecs on everybody and there will ensue decades of grumbling.)