Blockbuster Video VHS insert template
github.com
github.com
> Rewinding to the beginning of VHS tapes was honestly so long that nobody really forgot.
Hmm, if it took so long, wouldn't it have caused the reverse effect? That people would ignore it out of laziness? Maybe I'm too spoiled! :D
> These rental cassettes were red, approximately 7 inches (180 mm) high by 6.5 inches (170 mm) wide by 1.5 inches (38 mm) deep (however used the same videotape used today) and could not be rewound by a home Cartrivision recorder. Rather, they were rewound by a special machine upon their return to the retailer.
Pic of rewound VHS: https://www.becomingminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...
Ah the days of audio books on tape. For a moment I was thinking "renting audio tapes?" but then the memories hit me.
I had a TV, but no cable and poor reception (I remember watching snowy news broadcasts of the LA riots). I honestly did be not miss it. This was pre-internet, so most of my consumption was through books.
The interesting thing was when BB would get the latest box set of the X-files. Pretty much the closest you could get to binging at the time. 4-5 tapes, 2 episodes per (it was never the entire season). Watch a tape per week. Always excited when the new set arrived.
I remember when Netflix started separating the DVD service from streaming and thinking they were absolutely crazy, because no one would ever want to watch movies from their computer, movies go in that box under the TV…
I think I first connected a laptop with a tv-out to a TV in like 2003. Wasn’t hard to find a desktop video card with video out.
But the people doing that probably weren’t the first to sign up for a pay streaming service.
The Boxee came out in 2010. Like an early android box for your TV and supported Netflix, but could also stream from a network drive. I remember paying ~CAD$200 (or CAD$250?) for one and got a $25 best buy gift card.
~3 years later I sold the boxee for $100 and bought a Chromecast with that gift card and another few bucks.
You couldn't browse the catalog on the device. You had to open the website on a computer and add anything you wanted to watch to your queue. The Roku would only let you select items from that list. The same queue that was used for the DVD mailings.
I was a BB customer and worked for Hollywood Video for quite a while, just as Netflix started taking over. It was sad.
There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals. Looking back and seeing Netflix and the other streaming options sprouting up, and the "cut the cord" movement.. it was neat. Until you look at where we are now. We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.
We all got swindled, and it's too late to do anything about it now.
Please do say it! I'm old enough to remember VHS and video clubs, but may be not old enough to have a lot of nostalgia about it.
I can't think of what was better then. Sometimes you'd get a kind and knowledgeable video club owner who'd made fantastic recommendations, but more often than not it was an underpayed kid who just wanted to go home.
May be people used to take watching a move more seriously, and therefore enjoy it more, when the process was more involved and you didn't have millions of movies and shows a few clicks away, but does that count as an advantage?
> We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.
This was certainly not true where I lived. The ammount of movies and shows that get watched in an average household these days would bankrupt the family in the 90s.
No doubt there's a certain amount of nostalgia baked into these impressions. But definitely the thing I remember most fondly about that era was how decisions about things (movies, music, cereals, blenders, etc.) were made by looking at what was available and (maybe) doing a bit of research with external sources (like a "movie guide" book or whatever), rather than constantly wading through a morass of "recommendations", fake reviews, broken search functionality, and so on.
Not algorithm free, just a different kind of algorithm. Probably a mix of marketing and manual curation. Video stores (at least good ones) would be organized for you to find exactly what you were looking for… even if you didn’t know what you were looking for. If you saw a wall full of the most recent summer blockbuster movie, you might be drawn to rent that one. Why? Because you’re perceiving that movie to be “popular selection”. Or if there was a special section of “date night comedy”, you could browse there if that was what you were looking for.
But “staff picks” might have been a shelf with movies that weren’t performing well, with maybe one or two interesting movies to make the rest look better. Studios may have even paid for that placement (at larger chains). I have no idea if this really happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
As I see it, the algorithms are trying to bring order to a maddeningly long list of options[*]. The main goal being to help you find something you’d like to watch. If you like it, you’re happier and you’ll go back to that source (and keep paying for it). Regardless of told the source is YouTube, Disney+, Netflix, or Blockbuster Video.
In this way, we’ve always had curation… so effectively the algorithm wasn’t a “we think you’d like this”, maybe it was a “Randall” at the counter who you could ask for recommendations, or just a well organized store that led you to something you might like.
* - except the dark pattern algorithms that want you to just keep consuming media or increase “engagement”. I’m trying to look at it from a positive side.
another store i transferred to had a healthy supply of laser disc titles and members of the local professional basketball team essentially supported that store’s laser disc business.
e.g. if you don’t like monthly fees it’s still possible to “rent” movies on Apple TV, Amazon etc. for $5 (so cheaper than BB inflation adjusted).
Movies hardly make any money anymore outside of cinemas while DVD/VHS used to be a significant revenue source (up to 50%).
Walking around the store, looking at all the covers to try and figure out what we were going to watch. Usually, you had seen a preview for any given movie, or had at least heard about it, but there was still a lot of "rolling the dice", especially if the actor was famous: I saw Battlefield Earth because the cover looked cool and I liked space sci-fi, but the movie itself made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
In my culture, there's a strong push against being constantly online.
Phones must be kept in a backpack or otherwise stowed during social occasions, unless absolutely necessary.
Ideally, you turn them off, stuff them in a Faraday bag, and leave them in your car. Or just leave the phone at home.
Correlated to this is a focus on rebuilding some atrophied skills: getting around without Google Maps, being alone without needing the constant distraction of Youtube, etc.
The idea is that humans are not meant to live a life constantly mediated by an electronic nanny, and that you also need to maintain the skills to get along without one.
Related to this is a preference for physical media, or at least digital media over which you can exercise some control.
You're never going to escape government surveillance, but you can take steps to prevent advertisers from hoovering up every last bit of personal data that they can.
Doesn't mean the trademarks aren't valid, though. Here, there be [legal] dragonnes...
Appears the "OPEN" light was on in July of 2021 from street view.
https://bendblockbuster.com/new-releases/
the Alaska blockbuster did close though.
That explains www.blockbuster.com linking Sling TV.
We SHOULD have been streaming on Blockbuster and not Netflix today, but history is just a chain of blunders stitched together.
If they could pivot from rentals to streaming, why couldn't Blockbuster have done it?
I purchased VHS tapes, DVDs and subscribed to streaming services within about a decade of each other. That was a big transition for me and I’m technical. With the right kind of revenue sharing, DVD only rentals and cross promotions between streaming and in person rentals/events, they could have had something really interesting. I’m old enough to have rented VHS tapes so this may be a function of my age more than actual opportunity, but I know several people who even now would be far more tempted to subscribe to a streaming service if they could do it in a store.
Again, this is all theoretical, but Blockbuster had a lot of advantages back in the day. It wouldn’t be what it was, but the opportunities are fun to think through.
Where Blockbuster would have moved from brick and mortar to streaming, Netflix would have been moving from mostly a logistics business with warehouses in the middle of nowhere to a streaming/tech business.
On the user side, the storefronts could have helped a lot of less technical people set up their first streaming accounts at home. It was a massive mental leap to go from “movies come out of that box under my tv” to streaming and the storefronts could have helped people make that transition.
It’s all to theoretical to talk about whether it would be good or bad for users. Implementing it correctly would have relied on Blockbuster being able to turn itself into a technology company without cannibalizing those things that made it attractive to makers. That is a very hard thing to do and they had to pull it off in a moving market.
Here’s the story
https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/the-other-last-blo...
Its just a matter of reversing the tape content, but I could imagine zoning south versus north hemi, so Australia VHS would not work in Europe :) I mean it would work but you would watch in reverse :)
I was making employee badges and someone said they were a "Card Carrying Conspiracy Theorist" so I was making ID badges, and though "huh - what would a "Conspiracy Theorist Badge" look like so while I was learning Bartender I made these.
https://imgur.com/a/badge-iterations-mwyjf9x
Where all the elements are driven by a table (you can connect them to xls, csv, sheets, any DB etc..
You can do barcodes in any format.
(point being you can load in the design elements of this inkscape - and make your own custom sleeves for your library super easy and have the barcodes generate correctly.)