Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive
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I get it, today's AI is pretty good, meh, not really, but it would be hard to beat my old "Dave". Maybe someday.
It's pretty good at suggesting exactly the same type of movies you've watched before, but not so good at those "but how about something completely different, but something that I'll still like" suggestions, that's where a real human movie buff can help.
Additionally, studies have found that (when A/B testing recommender system vs no recommender system) users create their own, more localized "echo chambers" in absence of a recommender. This is measured by the "diversity" of content consumed, which decreases if a user is their own recommender.
The recommender in the GP and OP is a video store clerk, that’s probably self selected into that kind of job by their special interest in movies
Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite.
You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you.
Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard.
Kids movies are just for kids? Spirited Away!
You can't connect with female protagonists? You've got to see The Invisible Man.
Don't find food interesting? Try Tampopo.
Sick of movies which try to make a statement and fall flat? Promising Young Woman.
Most dramas feel too contrived? Marriage Story.
Musicals and plays aren't really your thing? Hamilton.
I like cowbell.
Here is an endless loop of cowbell ringing and nothing else.
It's like torture.
Whenever I try to get a service or other to recommend music they are remarkably bad at this.
Love GGP's anti-recommendation engine.
Tbh, almost all of the recommendations I follow are word of mouth, so I'd really appreciate such an engine.
Movie and music recommendation engines seem to work like this. Human tastes are much more complex and multi-dimensional than "This person prefers genre X" but AI systems don't even come close to grasping the subtlety.
I would agree. You have to see it at least once to appreciate it :)
With Netflix or whatever Streaming Service you have you have an immense catalogue coupled with ease of access to get ratings/critiques/etc. There is so many things to choose from and it's so easy to just say "no" to a suggestion, and likely that thing you said "no" to will still be there tomorrow. Why not just keep browsing?
With the video store of old it's so much more purposeful. You pick up a movie, and you feel incentivized to watch it because you literally just paid for it. You paid for that one Movie, not access to the entire store (which you also need to physically go to, and then come all the way back home with a tape or dvd). Also the ubiquity of movie/tv reviews was not as present so you don't necessarily feel like you're making a bad choice.
Going to the video store was organic and analog. Like going to your barista that still insists on using the hand pump espresso machine. Perhaps the human touch still is the best?
It’s still going to be a while before a recommendation engine takes in to account the kind of day you’ve had, whether anyone else is going to join you, how you and your spouse are doing today, how you want to start the night, how you want to end the night, and so-on. A good staff member can answer all those questions just by looking you in the eyes.
I got curious, so let's look it up.
Googling, it looks like maybe Netflix has 17,000 titles total in in it's collection internationally in april 2022, but only a portion of those are available in a given market. One page from 2021 said the US catalog was ~5K titles, but I bet it's bigger in 2022 as the overall catalog has grown as much as 30% maybe. So I dunno, let's say somewhere between 5K and 8K titles available in USA market netflix?
How many titles did a typical Blockbuster carry? From 1988: "Blockbuster, for instance, operates superstores that stock roughly 10,000 tapes (about 6,500 different titles), compared to the 1,500 to 2,500 a typical independent offers." —https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/01/business/a-tight-squeeze-...
(Blockbuster didn't have much/any TV, while that's potentially a big part of Netflix though?)
So it's the same ballpark anyway. Netflix doesn't actually have a whole lot more titles than a Blockbuster did.
I'm just reporting the number of titles they had and the number netflix does.
Definitely you can now get access to almost everything that exists from your own home, including things that were hard to find before, for sure. especially if you know how to and are willing to pirate. (You actually can't currently get Naruto or Gundam on netflix us streaming, can you?)
The part I took away was how everyone sat together for lunch and you might find yourself at a table with a stranger who is not in your field but you just talk and you create community.
And face to face is different than online. I do both and for me the face to face interaction is what makes life enjoyable.
That, in a nutshell, is what is valuable about going into a Blockbuster (or any store, restaurant, etc ) meeting people and building relationships.
Take this comment for instance; if I were to have this conversation face to face, it would be a completely different experience. The other party could hear the tone of my voice, see the expression on my face. We could shake hands, slap each other on the shoulder, and share a drink together.
And yet, my city DOES have an independent/artsy local video rental store, that I'm sure has all sorts of things I'd like watching. I don't go to it. I don't even have a DVD player or VCR. I stream.
But I also love going to the book store with my kids and thumbing through the books and videos and music. Picking them up, smelling them (helpless romantic I guess), talking about them.
The other day, a random person came up to me and shared a memory of her child because of something she overheard me say to my child and it was a great interaction. I felt connected in a way I maybe didn't realize I missed. And it wouldn't have happened (not the same way at least) online.
It’s allowed me to learn from colleagues, make friends and create a sense of belonging, my lab isn’t just an abstract organization but a group of interesting people.
Consumers and employees aren't in it for the social interaction.
Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list.
Meanwhile, the studios became more risk averse as people started preferring to watch at home. Then theaters shut down and studios became more risk averse. And Netflix and Amazon arose and started playing studio games and studios became even more risk averse.
That trajectory of fear is mirrored in the content. The 1970s were known for directorial freedom and risk-taking. The 70s gave us Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Star Wars, Animal House, Annie Hall, Rocky, Halloween, Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, MASH, and more - not all high art but all complete gems. Every decade since, we've seen a gradual progression toward samey-ness.
I think you’re confusing stream-all-you-want for a monthly fee vs pay-per-view providers.
We're making a better world for consumers, but sometimes I wonder if it's a better world for people.
Have you actually on multiple occasions wondered about this? Or has your brain just been colonized by pithy statements?
I've visited a TON of taste-making sites and some used to be OK at suggesting what to watch, but it's been tough to find good ones lately, and I'd pay good money for somebody to sort through all of the cruft for me.
You've got your "decider" and other sites, but something more personal, or at least human curated in terms of "here is the canon of this genre" or "if you liked this you'll 1000% like this other thing"
"You borrowed this a couple of months ago." "Oh yeah. Whoops. I remember now."
Meanwhile a priority row on streaming sites is WATCH IT AGAIN. And I do because the selection is so poor that I'd rather re-watch bits of favourite films over and over.
Blockbuster, though, no.
If you wanted to pay old Blockbuster prices (adjusted for inflation) for x5 good, and personalised, Netflix recommendations a month, I'm sure what you have left after the subscription itself would find a bunch of movie buffs online happy to earn $20-50/month (I'm too lazy to figure out what a typical old monthly cost was, or would be after inflation) by learning what you've liked in the past and thinking of recommendations based on whichever platform you're subscribed to.
And equally, some shops still exist selling films physically, though relatively few because most people don't want to pay more.
Hey, maybe there's a startup idea there - connecting subscribers with paid individual recommenders. But I'll stick to not paying extra for members of staff I never asked recommendations of, personally.
Blockbuster always had the least interesting inventory of the rental places in our neighborhood and their employees tended to be less knowledgeable, but because they were the only place that was guaranteed to have the latest box office hits, they drove the other stores out of business. Their homogenization and crapification of the video rental industry is what created the opportunity for Netflix's rise -- NFLX's original DVD-by-mail catalog was vast and movie buffs could finally get their hands on the obscure classics they were no longer able to find locally.
I started converting / collecting most of my movie collection onto a localized server years ago, and glad I did. Though I rarely watch all my old movies (a growing list of about 1000 including most of my favorite TV shows), the end game I think we all know is everything streamed, with no actual ownership of content. It's not a terrible notion, but the problem I think we've all seen is it's now turned into a corporate ownership game, and you never know where the content you're interested in watching is. One day Star Trek is on Netflix, the next Paramount, etc.
The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes, even though I'm a firm believer in unless you're watching on something well over 100" a nice high-quality 1080P file looks just great on a large 85" tv (which I currently have).
It depends on the source material.
As luck would have it, I just recently got the 4K Blu-ray of Lawrence of Arabia, and it is very very grainy. Much more so than the 4K version of Rear Window, though that has a lot of noticeable grain.
Fortunately, some theaters still occasionally show classics like these, so when Lawrence comes around, we should find out. Hopefully. Assuming it comes in on big reels of film, and not over a digital link.
I presume your Blu-Ray transfer was processed conservatively. Digital filters to remove film grain can introduce their own artifacts which degrade the image quality and make the picture look different from how it was originally intended to be seen.
The closest you can get to that experience now is to use an emulator and apply some heavy shaders (some emulators have built-in shaders, but if one doesn't I'd recommend installing reshade and setting up CRT-Royale and GTUv050).
1. A much bigger issue is NTSC composite. Making it look like a CRT is a much smaller part of the picture than what NTSC composite effects do. For example, If you were to hook up the RGB headers on an SNES (yes, the SNES has RGB headers on the board) to an actual CRT it would look awful because SNES games were designed with NTSC blending effects in mind.
2. There are scanlines and there are good scanlines. Most artificial scanlines look like garbage and not at all like an actual CRT's scanlines. There are some good filters out there, but you really have to do your research. If you see the words "slot mask" used to describe the filter, it's probably good. This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of the CRT-Royale reshade filter, because it does an excellent job at emulating the look of a slot mask.
Just watch My Life in Gaming's YouTube videos about getting the best output from a console.
The Retrotink and the OSSC are very highly praised and designed by retro game enthusiasts. While I have not personally used one I'm sure they're probably pretty good.
I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.
The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!
However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter they used for grain removal made the flesh tones and facial features look “wrong”.
Even worse was the wholly unnecessary conversion from 4:3 to 16:9. The resulting composition of many scenes was distractingly bad. At one stage, they the second camera unit can be seen filming the action from the side!
Edit: Fortunately, Disney+ have made The Simpsons (another transfer from film) available in 4:3 – as well as the default 16:9. There’s a setting in the UI to play it in 4:3.
https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-spac...
But ds9 is not as popular as tng, and I think fewer of the effects where done on film, so it might bring in less revenue but may be even more expensive to remaster than tng.
Some people redid some ds9 battle scenes on YouTube and they look awesome. There’s also some remastered footage in the de8 documentary (I think “what u leave behind”?)
Makes u dream a little
Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.
I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.
I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.
We're either moments before or moments after direct competition between UHD televisions and AI-aided upscaling and artificial sharpness, where details that never existed in the original are being precisely rendered by screens with higher resolutions than the human eye.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...
Also "2K" is mess of a term people shouldn't use. By better definitions it should mean either almost-1080p or a loose term for 1080p. 1440p is often called 2K but it really isn't. 2560x1440 is 2.5K if anything.
Also got a hi-fi beta player recently and even though Beta is only 10 more lines than VHS at 250 (compared to 420 for LD and SVHS) it really did not look that bad on an LCD. It's also possible that the unit I received and the tape I tried it with have less wear than the average VHS VCR.
The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many thanks to the talented fans for putting the de-specialized versions together.
I'm wondering with the resurgence in popularity of the LP, and with media stores re-configuring their store fixtures to sell them, if we'll get Bluray films being distributed in the large 12" size with large photos and booklets.
Sites like Pandora where you can't choose your playlist do come under mandatory licenses. But services where you can play any music on demand is individually negotiated with the rights holders. The reason competition is ubiquitous is that the music labels didn't want to be beholden to one company during the streaming era like they were with Apple during the iTunes era. Besides, they make all of the money from streaming (70%+) and leave the services with a pittance. It's a horrible business to be in as a standalone service.
It only makes sense as an integrated offering. Spotify and every other stand alone service is going to always be stuck with the "Dropbox problem". A streaming service is a feature not a product.
There are also government mandated max royalties for songwriters.
When I was a part time fitness instructor, the only way you could get music from the original artist was by knowing some DJs who did it low-key who could mix music on the 32 count phrase with a consistent beats per minute (step/cardio kickboxing etc.). The more mainstream fitness music had to use cover versions of the music. It's easier to get a license on the music, song writing than the entire performance.
You or the studio also had to have a separate performance license to play the music during class.
I can go on and on forever and I yada yada yada'd over the details on purpose.
I think the "what we've become accustomed to" is the most important factor there. Back in the VHS/NTSC days, without experience of anything else, I had not complaints about the quality.
- Tapes would get chewed by the player
- Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding)
- Tapes would degrade the more you used them
- sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware
- audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock
- if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording
- and even just getting the same content recorded was a game of chance. If the TV network was early or late airing your show or movie, there was a good chance you’ll end up missing some of it (back then there wasn’t an EPG so you had to programmed the VCR to start at a specific time rather than the start of a specific show).
Not to mention my younger brother kept jamming Lego into the VCR (but at least that’s not the fault of the technology).
I hated VHS. Switched to DVD the moment I could. Even though my computer wasn’t powerful enough to playback DVD properly I still massively preferred it.
It was a hassle having to switching discs midway through a movie, but there were a few enterprising people who sold players that let you insert two discs!
I was talking about video quality, not that other stuff.
> - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording
This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.
I covered video quality too
> This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.
It’s definitely not worse now. Or at least not in the U.K. Regular broadcasters all have on demand / catch up services (like BBC iPlayer). These services are neatly integrated into nearly all smart TVs via Freeview Play and have been for roughly a decade already.
Then you have purely streamed content that has all of the benefits of the above minus the drawbacks of following a TV schedule. Which is great because the 30 to 50 year olds (yes, I actually know these figures because I’ve worked in broadcasting) generally prefer binge watching content rather than weekly instalments.
Then you have younger generations who prefer streamed content like Twitch and YouTube. Both of which also support rewatching previously live content.
In addition to all that, for households that don’t have good internet, there are still PVRs available free with premium subscription TV like Sky+/Q. And just to be clear, you absolutely do not need a Sky subscription to use a PVR. My mum has one hooked up and she only has access to terrestrial TV (Freeview). Some TVs even have PVR software built in and all thus you need is to plug a USB storage device into in.
Finally, for us nerds, there are a plethora of additional options available like Kodi, Plex, AppleTV plus convenience protocols like DLNA, ChromeCast, AirPlay, etc.
It has literally never been easier to consume video content and catch up on missed TV. And the fact that terrestrial TV viewing figures are dropping rapidly (again, I’ve worked in the industry so have seen the actual statistics on these things) is proof that people are choosing to consume TV in different ways then they did back in the days of VHS. (And there’s literally nothing stopping anyone from still using VHS if they really wanted to).
and now we have 4k and ATMOS
I don’t think anyone has forgotten how crappy VHS was/is.
At least with vinyl, the sound quality was good even if the medium was bulky. But VHS just sucked in every way imaginable. Even in the 80s I hated VHS. It was the best we had but it always felt like a game of chance whether your recordings worked. I don’t miss a single thing about recording and playing video back then.
> The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes
A lot of the time content is just upscaled rather than remastered anyway. Particularly with TV shows but plenty of “HD” movies were just upscaled from DVDs rather than remastered from the original film rolls.
I just remember VHS audio sounding muffled after the tape had been used a few times.
To be fair, recording stuff from RF wouldn’t have helped much either.
Stereo audio, like colour video, was an advancement that came after broadcasting had already been standardised. Which means they had to find room in the signal to squeeze that additional information in (this is why TV sets that aren’t sync with the broadcasting feed go black and white). Stereo was a relatively recent addition, maybe late 80s or early 90s (I remember really clearly when the technology was turned on but can’t recall how old I was) so it wouldn’t surprise me if stereo audio was subject to the same syncing issues as colour video.
VHS HiFi seems to be a different format entirely but which also used the same storage media (like how CDs have a few different storage formats supported by the same hardware optical discs)
But no need to speculate:
To quote:
> Each of the diagonal-angled tracks is a complete TV picture field, lasting 1/60 of a second (1/50 on PAL) on the display. One tape head records an entire picture field. The adjacent track, recorded by the second tape head, is another 1/60 or 1/50 of a second TV picture field, and so on. Thus one complete head rotation records an entire NTSC or PAL frame of two fields.
Edit: This a diagram here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC that illustrates how each transmissions frequency is divided up for different aspects of the broadcast.
VHS stores the video as it was broadcast.
But how the audio is stored, has nothing to do with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television
There were different ways to transmit audio over the air waves, but it was done on a different frequency from the video. There were even schemes to broadcast the audio on regular FM stereo as. Some VCRs had a separate audio in so you could use a separate audio source for instance for dubbing. (But you had to record video at the same time, because of the head switching. So no going back and edit only the audio or only the video, with VHS.)
The audio on VHS was originally stored just like on audio cassette tapes, quoth the VHS wikipedia:
"audio was recorded as baseband in a single linear track, at the upper edge of the tape, similar to how an audio compact cassette operates."
HiFi quote from the same article:
"Hi-Fi audio is thus dependent on a much more exact alignment of the head switching point than is required for non-HiFi VHS machines. Misalignments may lead to imperfect joining of the signal, resulting in low-pitched buzzing"
The audio is not stored at the end or beginning of anything, it's continuous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_rTTptah0
The HiFi audio is recorded "deeper" in the tape, then they video is laid down on top of that.
It can be interpreted either way (at least by my brain) - chopped up after video, or "after video on the video tape but continuously".
I think this exchange is what they call "violent agreement" :-D
Just coincidentally, today I came across the the wikipedia entry for the last Laserdisc release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders in September 2001.
The movie cost 99 cents to rent, which I thought was surprisingly cheap. The clerks were talking about how people come in to take pictures (no surprise there) and were usually inconsiderate about including the clerks in photos.
It smelled exactly the same in there. It was neat.
As in, rudely excluded the clerks, or rudely included? Either way makes sense me to me.
I actually liked our local Blockbuster, and have fond memories of it, but only because it was run by the same employees from the independent video store it drove out of business. I liked that one even better.
Mostly because Amazon decimated corporate chains, which freed up more market for independent stores.
Most of them are tied to a coffeeshop though. But if you check your local map you might be surprised.
I loved B&N by the way, more computer-related books than WaldenBooks, but not as many as Borders.
They've broadened out into being general "gift stores". My local Barnes and Noble has a large toys section (mostly LEGO and educational stuff), board games, puzzles, music (lots of vinyl), stationery (fancy journals).
It's essentially "stuff introverts like" in a nice space.
Is there a source for this? Usually, both rise and fall together with consumer demand. When I grew up, Blockbuster was one of a dozen options in town.
As an example, there are more independent coffee shops today than before Starbucks expanded.
essentially blockbuster operated at larger scales than many small video businesses and so had smaller unit costs while also having more selection.
I didn’t play games much but I recall them also renting out Japanese nintendo games and also sold the necessary cartridge converters to play Starfox.
The "name" of the reason might be Blockbuster, but the actual reason was that Blockbuster had a larger selection. Those mom and pop stores were really small, so if you wanted something else you had to go to Blockbuster anyway, so why bother dealing with more than one store even for the stuff they had? Just get everything at Blockbuster.
It's the same with retail stores - I don't go to the small stores, even if they might have what I want - why should I? I can go to the larger store and get everything and not have to think about it.
People drink less office/gas station coffee than they used to, and so can drink more Starbucks/independent coffee. The same didn't happen to the mom and pop video rental places (though the ones that survived blockbuster, usually by being in a market too small to support a Blockbuster, often outlived them (the one near me closed a few years ago finally)).
In another town we lived in, the video rental place was a local chain with fewer than 10 locations, maybe just around 5. I don't remember if a Blockbuster even existed locally.
If it was Friday night, and you'd just sent back your netflix disc -- or you were looking to watch something that wasn't at the top of your queue, the mom and pop video rental place was your only option. At least in NYC, it seemed like this kept those places going a little but longer than anyone would have guessed when Block Buster was still around.
Though once streaming became prevalent they all disappeared pretty quickly.
It’s more discomforting than ironic.
I think there's probably a lot of people who have that from their childhood.
Similarly, CVS sells cheerios for $7 a box. I don't think CVS is evil, sometimes I'm just lazy.
For Blockbuster selling snacks, no one is under any pressure to buy snacks there. If you're really pressed for time or don't want to drive to another store for snacks, then maybe the ludicrously high price is worth it. If it's not worth it to you at that moment, then don't buy there.
It's only bad if there's a monopoly or some other form of coercion involved, which is clearly not the case for Blockbuster selling snacks. And yet, to some people, it proves that Blockbuster is the devil...
As it turns out, they did a really good job of insulating us as kids from the backup plans for broken VHS tapes, late fees, mis-boxed movies, returns that were accepted but never registered, out-of-stock hit movies, and other 'adult' problems. Their memories of movie nights did not have quite the same golden hue, but they were happy that they'd fostered that kind of memory in spite of the stresses of parenting.
Lol, I grew up overseas and TGIF was where we'd go to celebrate "American style" as a family, like on the 4th of July or whatever. First time I ever had potato skins. Didn't even know that was considered an edible food source until that day. Blew my mind as a kid.
The fast casual restaurant chain still exists, and is definitely still cartoonishly embellished with Americana, and surprisingly decent food for what it is.
It happened with record stores, too, via Tower Records and other national chains I can’t remember now
[0] Well, if they had it and it was in stock.
Speaking of which, I miss video game rentals. I spent so much time as akid at Blockbuster looking for games to rent. Even now, I'd like to be able to play with a game for a few days before committing to paying for the whole game.
(and of course, I say this with a hundred unplayed games in my Steam library...)
I distinctly remember 2 specific problems: 1) Being unable to get the latest release you wanted to watch. This was a big problem when video stores (not just Blockbuster) would only get in a few copies of new movies. Eventually Blockbuster got some sort of deal with the studios where they would get in something like 100 copies of the latest releases and the problem became #2:
2) Being unable to find anything but the most popular movies. If you wanted to watch that slightly less popular artsy film (but not anything as obscure as a foreign film, just not a (lowercase "b") blockbuster movie), they'd only have a few copies of it, and they'd inevitably all be rented out whenever you wanted to watch it.
I just remember going around the entire store and saying, "seen it, seen it, seen it, don't want to see it, seen it," etc.
I'm sure their parents who were responsible for rewinding the tapes, late fees, etc. remember the video stores less fondly.
But for me, it's not really about Blockbuster. It's about the format of home video. All the ritual, the excitement surrounding a new release that everyone wanted, sitting down to watch it together. It's about the object of video, the thing you can hold, and is similar to why I like to collect vinyl. I like the artifact in and of itself, along with what's encoded on it.
TBH I'm a bit surprised no one has tried to buy the Blockbuster brand from Dish and restart the company. I feel like you could effectively run one much like a comic book store, there's always a niche that will patronize the business.
They'll also name the song playing, if any.
It's interesting that Lucasfilm ostensibly invested in the xanaverse but instead of doing something like this, they somehow became focused on creating an MMO instead.
I’m ok renting or buying digital movies from a big corp like Apple or Disney now that I don’t have to drive to a store.
Though the pipe to my house doesn’t need a big corp because we should have a free national municipal fiber network.
Best of both worlds?
Wait? It was? I grew up through the 90s and have nothing but fond memories of Blockbuster
Just getting to explore a new game for a little bit and then try something else next time was so much fun; you never knew what you were gonna get, just going off the box art. Even better was during the cartridge years, when you'd take a game home and it might already have a few different saves on it from other people, and you'd get to visit their characters and worlds, jump in at different points in the game, and try to imagine how it all fit together.
There was a gap of many years between Netflix killing Blockbuster, and game subscriptions becoming a thing where you could try them out casually again. Though of course even then, all the same physical nostalgia is missed; browsing the aisles, scrutinizing the boxes to try and figure out what it'll be like when you take it home, etc.
Hoping similar stores make a resurgence someday.
I wonder if you could combine them into some kind of "movie mishmash" where you could see new movies in the theater, rent older classics, or even buy new releases. Being able to stop in, grab a movie and hot popcorn, and drive home seems it could be a winner.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-really-killed-bloc...
It's amazing that Blockbuster had Netflix on the ropes, until one notorious activist investor showed up and basically gave Netflix the win.
One man is responsible for creating a completely different timeline when it comes to video streaming. Very similar to how we would be living in a different reality if GM's ahead-of-its-time EV1 was not mysteriously disappeared in the 90s.
In the 80s.
Couldn't he just virtualize? There is USB-Floppy devices, these days, to get even the last bit of compatibility right.
I think that physically going to _any_ special destination such as for tourism may be on a steep decline in the next few decades. VR glasses and goggles will be coming out that are very lightweight, comfortable, and convincing. We will also have eye tracking and eye contact in VR. There will be more advanced, faster more realistic 3d scanning of locations. There will also be the ability to "live scan", transmit and faithfully reproduce people moving around in an area. This will take advantage of advancements in graphics and AI.
Haptic glove technology will improve.
The conversation will be something like "remember when you had to actually _travel_ 5000 miles to see the Sistine Chapel or the last Blockbuster?"
Also, many times I witnessed exasperated parents and grandparents paying a huge late fee because their kids forgot to drop them off.
Seems buggy as fuck.
Someone's acting the maggot? No matter where they are, they get a subject access request. Followed by a request to correct or delete data.
The ability to legally force companies to correct inaccurate data is incredibly useful.
If they want to be annoying on purpose, we should blame them, not the GDPR.
RIP RadioShack