Are DVDs the real killer of video rental stores?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Formats
TMC-4 — 9 years ago(January 04, 2017 06:31 PM)
The deaths of most video rental places are usually blamed on streaming sites like Netflix, etc, and while that's true, does anyone think that DVD might also have been a factor? Most videos started out way above the price of the average viewer, and even when they did move to sell-through, it was still kind of expensive, making renting the video a cheaper alternative. Compare that to DVD, while the early discs were expensive, they eventually became more affordable, and they had special features which gave more options for repeat viewing, no to mention the TV on DVD market. Most people would rather pay the $20 (or less) and pick up the DVD and watch it at their convenience, rather than be forced to watch it in an allotted amount of time (or have to pay late fees).
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Dark_Knight_Of_Gotham — 9 years ago(January 05, 2017 05:23 PM)
Not really. People go for what's convenient, not what's better. Streaming is more convenient than driving to a store in a snowstorm for a DVD, plus it's cheaper to pay a $10 subscription a month to view hundreds of movies, than it is to buy a $20 DVD/Bluray. I personally prefer physical media over digital, but I can see why it's on it's way out.
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NinToaster — 9 years ago(January 05, 2017 05:39 PM)
No, because the customers could still rent the dvd discs and return them just like they did with the vhs tapes
"I told my man I'm going to get a pap smear. he said 'bring me one no mustard'" - Adele Givens -
persen1 — 9 years ago(January 14, 2017 04:45 PM)
No, because the customers could still rent the dvd discs and return them just like they did with the vhs tapes
If anything, they put more life back in to the video rental stores, because the introduction of the DVD also made it one heck of a lot more easy and faster to make copies of the rented movies.
VHS had to be real time copied, the DVD using the correct software, cut that time down to less than
10 minutes and you had a clone that was region + copy protection free of the disc on your hard drive.
Hence why a tool such as DVD Shrink was so darn popular back in the days. -
Nuclear_Exorcist — 9 years ago(January 06, 2017 01:55 AM)
Yeah I used to get annoyed by the fact that often if a movie was a 1-day rental new release I wouldn't have time to watch all the extra features (not even taking into consideration things like interactive features and audio commentaries) so I stopped renting a long time before all the stores started going out of business. I still kept buying ex-rental discs though!
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ndga13 — 9 years ago(January 11, 2017 01:56 PM)
I'm thinking just the internet in general is what killed video rental stores. When I was a kid, the big thrill of going to a video rental store was trying to sneak into the curtained off adult sections and try to rent a porno. Free porn on the internet eliminated the need for the porno section and the mom and pops shops in general. You weren't getting porn at Blockbuster and the mom and pops couldn't compete with their mainstream movie selection.
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dangus — 9 years ago(January 19, 2017 06:21 PM)
Porn might be the answer, combined with piracy by tech-literate young people who were probably the largest consumers of lucrative new releases. Video stores began dying off well before Netflix streaming became common.
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lebugg — 9 years ago(January 21, 2017 07:34 PM)
It was a combination of things
-The internet became huge
-PPV got much bigger and the window of time between a video released and when a film hit PPV kept getting smaller.
-Premium Cable channels expanded. Instead of just having HBO, people now had HBO, HBO2, HBO Comedy, HBO Family for the same price.
-Chain videostores like Blockbuster and Hollywood drove most of the smaller mom and pop stores out of business by being able to load up on 50-100 copies of the latest big movies. This also resulted in movies having a shorter shelf life as everyone could rent a new release within a week or two of release. It hurt business on catalog titles as people became conditioned to grabbing the week's new movies without even looking at the older stuff.
By the time DVD came along video stores were already dying out.