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