For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night | Hacker News Reader

For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night

theringer.com

37 pointspmcpinto47 comments

I used to love Blockbuster. But that love quickly faded with their business practices. Their policy of putting a hit against your credit report when you had a late charge on a movie was the first strike. Not a movie that you kept weeks and weeks on end at your house letting the charge pile up. Nope a two day late charge that you didn't pay because you just assumed that you would pay it the next time you rented a movie. There was a class action lawsuit against them about this very practice.

The second strike was about lost movies. My ex rented movies so we could watch them. That night I put them on the floor of the back seat of my car so I could head in to work at the club. I came back and someone had gotten into the car and took the movies. I reported to theft to blockbuster expecting to have to pay for the movies. They tried to charge me $200 for each movie. $600 total. I asked them where they nuts. I wasn't paying that. I told them I could get the same movies down the street from Walmart at $20 a piece and give them to you. They said fine, go ahead and do that. Why would you be that unreasonable in the first place and try to charge me that crazy amount.

I used to manage a video rental store in Australia. Can't say anything abiut the credit report thing, that's just rediculious.

With regards to the $200 each movie, it's like that because they want you to do what you did and go somewhere else to buy it. They can't tell you that directly though because it's walking the line copyright wise.

Not sure about the US but here in Australia you have to buy the media from a licenced studio distributer (Always costs at least $10 more than kmart or target) for it to be allowed to be rented. By getting you to go out and get the movie they don't change the asset ID in their system and no one is any the wiser.

Not true in the US.

You can rent any physical media. No special license required.

No license required? nor fee? I mean, if you can rent any physical media it’s a big loss of revenue for a studio, I’ve always assumed the studios got a share of rentals.

No license or fee required. It's called the first-sale doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

I worked in a video store in London for a few years back in the day. We paid tens and sometimes (for the big releases) hundreds for movies from our supplier; because we got them before they were available to the public, we were paying for that window of time in which the only way to see the movie was to rent if from us. I think (but certainly cannot be sure) I recall that the agreement forced our hand; if they were selling the movie, we had to buy from them, even after it was available to the general public. Some kind of franchise agreement.

In Search of the Last Great Video Store – The Black List Blog || https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-s...

I grew up about 2 blocks away from Scarecrow Video in Seattle. I'm happy it's still around. Place was amazing, and... in the late 80s and early 90s they weren't dicks about renting R movies to kids like Blockbuster was. I remember being like 11, and I negotiated a monthly punch card in lieu of allowance. I could rent any 12 movies I wanted! Such power for a kid. And the clerk always had great suggestions.

It's because of Scarecrow that I got introduced to great films early... The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Apartment, Giant, 12 Angry Men, Dr. Strangelove... anyway for a kid in a single parent home, I lucked out getting to watch old classics when my friends were all busy watching stupid cartoons and Saved By The Bell re-runs.

It may be time for video rental stores to make a minor comeback. Like vinyl. Netflix's online catalog keeps shrinking, and Youtube has been cracking down so hard that movies from the 1930s have been taken offline.

Redbox is a much smarter business model. No rental space or employees needed.

But doesn’t solve the problem. Selection is very limited due to the lack of space.

Is that really the problem? Everybody endlessly talks about how Netflix has failed to crack the recommendation nut for something like ten years now. Maybe a smaller, more curated selection will make a comeback, as the pendulum swings away from infinite selection (of mostly garbage).

The problem with Netflix, at least in Europe, is that good films are removed and garbage stays.

Its the same in Australia. Annoying as all get out. Stan has a much better selection.

It solves the renting current blockbusters problem but, for most people with decent internet, that's not much of a problem and Redbox' results reflect that.

As another commenter noted, Redbox doesn't solve the back catalog problem and Netflix increasingly doesn't either. Going forward you may have to go back to just buying discs for some types of films. (Torrents aren't very consistent with old movies either.)

I have to digress, regarding the availability of torrents for old movies. At a recent conference I got a chance to look at the content of a non-public site, and it's by far the most comprehensive catalog of movies with a "delivery time" of less than 24 hours for anything cheaper than FedEx overnight. There were next to no dubbed audio tracks though. It certainly was an interesting view into what already exists and appears to hold itself with just (comparatively) minimal resources on the side of the platform, judging by the absence of anything that looked like it was begging for money. The guy who let me take a look said the best part of it was that it pretty much "just worked", and noted the hassle with physical media handling and DRM breaking in non-standard display configurations/systems being the main reason they don't just buy discs.

I mean, we can do games without DRM, why can't we do the same with movies? Sure some will get copied. But it's not too hard to e.g. watermark content or otherwise go after those who share content illegally. If there was a way to buy instant-download DRM-free movies from a comprehensive catalog while paying a reasonable amount for each movie, that would drive many people away from torrents, at least those, that would buy if there were no torrents (i.e., that do it for convenience, not financial reasons).

It seems like the MPAA would rather leave that market segment out -- despite music showing that people do buy if they have the financial means and the UX is competetive -- than coordinating the creation of a single such service. Make each rightsholder set his price, and do it as some organisation that doesn't have to provide ROI from skimming money off of each transaction (like amazon marketplace, paypal and ebay).

In my home state, Family Video [0] is still very much alive, and growing. It's one of the traditions when I visit home: we go as a family to pick up a movie or two and some takeout pizza. They're pretty busy, too.

The lackluster and non-competitive broadband access helps keep them alive. "High speed" internet for most of my family back home supports low resolution Netflix, but other streaming is terrible at best (Hulu is unwatchable, for example). HD anything requires DVDs or Bluray.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Video

Southeast Missourian checking in. My town has a Family Video and my wife and I love to go every week or two and walk through and pick out something, maybe with a stop at Dominos on the way home. I was frankly shocked to see a real video rental store still in existence when we moved here but it's really quite a treat.

Why is netflix removing good movies and shrinks its online catalog?

Because the movie owners don’t want Netflix to have it. All the media companies are offering their own streaming service so it doesn’t make sense to give it to your competitor.

I was almost ready to consider Netflix, but ...

It seems like they're trying to drive people to pirated torrents and streaming. Not just because content is free. But because it's a lot easier to find.

>It may be time for video rental stores to make a minor comeback.

There's a free physical and digital media rental facility in nearly every community.

The Public Library.

Libraries aren't free. People pay for them through taxes, donations, etc.

Where I live in LA, there's a fantastic video store in walking distance. Selection is great, staff will talk to you about interesting choices, you can pay $4 for a one-time rental for a week, or you can buy a subscription.

I initially figured this might be an anomaly, because it's LA and movies/TV arguably occupy a more prominent space in this town. :)

But seeing other people talk about Family Video in places where broadband sucks (and honestly, broadband sometimes sucks for a lot of people ), considering that RedBox is broadly successful ... I could be persuaded there's room for more video stores.

Of course there are online video rentals available. We have Apple TV and just rent movies on that. I’m sure other services are available on Android based devices.

It would be great if there was a way to rent original contents from different streaming sites. Let's say I want to rent 'Terrace House' and 'Sopranos' on the same night, this website would allow me to do that with one interface and one 'buy' button.

Google Search will let you locate such content (it has a special UI for it, which is both platform aware—it will note services that aren't available on your platform, like iTunes on Android, as such—and customizable) and pricing, but it doesn't have a purchase interface, since the services don't have purchase APIs. Most providers would probably be against anything that would facilitate such aggregation, since that would commoditize them.

> I’m sure other services are available on Android based devices.

Google Play Movies & TV is available on Android, iOS, and Web. There are plenty of services that aren't tied to major mobile OS providers, too.

Obligatory link to the Onion's Blockbuster Living Museum video: https://entertainment.theonion.com/historic-blockbuster-stor...

Wonder why they just don’t start their own store?

do you want to negotiate a contract with hollywood?

Renting store bought DVDs is legal. There was a big court case about it in the 90s.

The beauty of Blockbuster is that you don’t have to! Thanks to the First Sale Doctrine, in the US, you don’t need permission from the copyright holder to loan out legal physical copies of copyright content.

The reasons “rental copies” exist is because they were more expensive versions that were available early so the rental stores could have them before they were for sale.

But it was (and I guess in rural Alaska maybe still is) perfectly viable to build a rental outfit based solely on retail copies of movies.

I don't remember how much it carried over to the DVD era, but there was a period when typical VHS tapes were priced very high and the expectation was that individuals would just rent them but some, like certain Disney films, were "priced to own" on the assumption they were the sort of movie which could be a Christmas stocking stuffer.

I think some of the big chains also had deals with the studios where they'd get a bunch of discs for a reduced price and paid a revenue percentage or something like that.

The start of this era was around 1987 with "Top Gun" https://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/15/arts/marketing-top-gun-ca...

I recall tapes were selling in the $65-80 range. Which was a lot of money in the early 90's. Because tapes would wear out with each play, I elected to buy 12" LaserDiscs which cost only slightly more, but would never wear out.

For those who never saw one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOrn2hBsYKE

I have a shelf full of laserdiscs that I honestly don't know what to with (and a laserdisc player). I don't want them and I assume there are individuals who do but I'm not about to go to a lot of trouble to sell them.

I suppose I could put the whole thing on Craigslist, take it or leave it. But I'm far enough out of a big city that I've never had much luck with that tactic.

If you have enough unusual content, perhaps archive.org could arrange to have it taken to them. They seem to have an interest digitizing older, non-digital media.

Depending on condition there’s quite the market for them on eBay. But yeah, it’s a hassle to package and ship them.

eBay?

Too much hassle.

> before they were for sale

Right, I bet a substantial pct of customers would just buy the dvd outright these days, if they can just get it from retail

There was an interesting story about RedBox a few years ago. Hollywood was trying to block them from buying movies for their kiosks. So they were sending armies of employees with gift cards out to all the Best Buy, Walmart, and whoever else sold the movie and was buying them at retail.

Even though a supreme Court case has upheld rental rights, Hollywood is still trying to keep them from buying the movies in the first place.

Why not just stop selling the movies instead of wasting all that time, capital, and effort?

Because they want to sell the movies. Just not to rental companies. Every DVD sold to redbox could be 20-30 DVDs that never get sold because people were able to rent it.

You don't need contracts with Hollywood; you can just buy the discs--although my understanding is that at least the big renters did have deals of various sorts. The article says that the Alaska Blockbuster stores, which were owned by someone else, were just slowly failing. This isn't a case of successful stores being shut down because a parent company as a whole failed.

I'm not sure how many copies on hand a rental store would need, but Hollywood has tried to block rental companies from buying in bulk for years. RedBox was sending employees out with gift cards to buy up enough stock. There were some lawsuits against retailers by Hollywood outfits for selling too many to single buyers.

The relationship between the studios and disc renters has gone back and forth over the years. The time of news around Redbox seems to have been about 10 years ago [1] when DVD sales were supposedly starting to decline significantly.

I'd be a bit surprised if it were an issue to the same degree today where video is often available for streaming rental (and on things like airline entertainment systems) before retail discs even go on sale.

And I don't know the latest numbers but Redbox revenue was (unsurprisingly) declining sharply as of a year or so ago and Netflix is letting its DVD back catalog rot to the point where it's almost not worth it.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/dvds-mitch-lowe-business-e...

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