Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive
dallasnews.comI am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how about something completely different, he would always find us something great. Or usually (one time he recommended Eraser head, we still laugh about that one, so even though it was a dud, great memory).
I get it, today's AI is pretty good, meh, not really, but it would be hard to beat my old "Dave". Maybe someday.
I feel like the difference isn't so much that you have AI recommendations or that of a human, but rather the entire environment is fundamentally different.
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.
> With Netflix or whatever Streaming Service you have you have an immense catalogue…
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.
Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest.
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.
Exactly. Blockbuster had all the movies the average person would be able to know about. Any movie that was advertised and known by the general public could be picked up at blockbuster and watched. It's not like that now. Now I have to Google which streaming service can I stream this or that on and then go to that service. It's as if there was a paramount movie store on one side of town, a Disney one on the other, MGM on the other. It's like car dealerships now, it used to be like grocery stores.
“All the movies an average person would know” — they’re all still available “to rent” from every major provider. No need to Google anything?
I think you’re confusing stream-all-you-want for a monthly fee vs pay-per-view providers.
You cant. It's often exclusives. If you want to see "seeing red" or any other Disney film, that's on Disney, if you want to see Val, Hulu, etc.
justwatch.com is way more effective/useful than Google.
I’ve been to a lot of Blockbusters and no way did any of them carry 6500 movies. Maybe 1000 tops. The majority of shelves were 20 boxes of the same tape/dvd for the most popular titles + 1-3 for other titles
It's just your usual nostalgia. I lived in the age before internet and it was shit. Then Kazaa happened and I could finally download Naruto and Gundam.
For me (my 2 cents), I think it's more than nostalgia. It's about community. It's about face to face interaction. I recently listened to a piece on NPR about lunches and working in France and why it's important. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/07/1103566695/lunching-work-when...
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.
I can’t overstate the value of the lunch hour in France, it’s by far the best part of my day and has made my PhD bearable, enjoyable even despite the difficult pandemic environment.
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.
I agree with you, I miss it. And some of this is pandemic-inspired too, really missed human contact then, and in the USA I worry some of it is never coming back.
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.
Don't get me wrong. I stream too. I think technology is great. I'm only a Luddite when my code won't compile. I do a lot of things on line. At least 8 hours of my day is developing software from my home, so my only interaction with my coworkers is through software. And I enjoy forums like Hacker News. And it's really convenient to instantly get a video.
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.
In my country minimum wage workers don't have to fake it so you are unlikely to get much "community" out of them lol.
Consumers and employees aren't in it for the social interaction.
I'm 46, I rented plenty from Blockbuster.
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?)
I fully agree but I also think that those “Daves” had something that current recommendation engines do not: an understanding of the many subtle things that make a movie right for you at that moment.
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 think it also costs Netflix more to offer high quality films to stream so there is a disincentive to quality and you have to really search sometimes. Blockbuster was more random than efficient/algorithmic like you would find a classic next to a complete dud which was kind of fun.
Exactly!
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?
today's AI is pretty good
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.
I've long pondered building exactly this, an anti-recommendation engine. You'd go through and mark some favorite films or genres, and it'd come back with something great but totally unlike your usual picks.
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.
Agree. Too much here is more of the same. Ugh.
I like cowbell.
Here is an endless loop of cowbell ringing and nothing else.
It's like torture.
Just noticed this again today. Spotify vs Hype Machine (browse, then "recommendations" by checking out people who also liked $song). Spotify is somehow stuck on dark, aggressive electronic music for me. It's not the only thing that I like, not even my favorite really.
Music recommendations are even worse than movies, in that they need to take into account what you've just listened to (if I'm listening to a specific genre, I'm unlikely to want something in a very different tempo and style), time of day (at bed time I'll often put on some soft classical music; that doesn't mean I want that every other time because I play it a lot), mood (if I suddenly play 1980's pop, it's probably nostalgia, and suddenly playing new music is not what I want), and at the same time I have preferences, but those are mediated by what I'm currently listening to.
Whenever I try to get a service or other to recommend music they are remarkably bad at this.
last.fm had my favorite auto-recommendation system, but it seems like they removed the personal and artist radio features.
Yeah, they're the closest I've been to being happy about recommendations by far, though they too did get into very weird "pockets" of recommendations for me at times (not bad, just very obsessively giving me music from a very small niche of my music interests).
Gotta have more of that cowbell!
And rainbows. :)
Love GGP's anti-recommendation engine.
Think indie movies aren't worth watching? Primer.
Tbh, almost all of the recommendations I follow are word of mouth, so I'd really appreciate such an engine.
This isn't completely true. What you're talking about are called "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles", and there are ways to make sure they don't negatively impact users.
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.
> 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
Some of you will remember the "Pepsi Challenge" [0] when Pepsi would make commercials about random people tasting unlabeled soft drinks. People usually chose Pepsi in taste tests because it was sweeter than Coke. What the commercials didn't show was that most people actually bought Coke because Pepsi is too sweet for many people when they drink a whole bottle.
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.
Remember when Netflix had the context for the best recommendation algorithm? I don't think they ended up using anything from it.
I haven't thought about it but most of the movies I've really enjoyed were recommended to me by my dad, girlfriend, or my brother in law. I can't think of anything I really enjoyed from a recommendation algorithm. The last movie I tried I certainly didn't enjoy.
The reality is likely that the algorithms are trying to increase viewership, not quality of views. So they are likely to feed you things that get you to watch another thing, rather than things that are worth watching, leave you satisfied, and off doing something else.
Do Netflix et al inject "noise" into their recommendation engines? Like 1/10 titles are random rather than based on your preferences in order to break out of "local minimums".
What's funny about all this Blockbuster nostalgia is that back in the day they were actually the bad guys. They were the big homogenous corporate chain that drove all the independent stores out of business. One of their key differentiators was to overstock Hollywood blockbusters at the expense of indie films, art films, cult classics etc. and to make sure that the indie stores wouldn't be able to get their hands on the big titles when they first came out.
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.
Yup - it's my first thought whenever I see these nostalgic accounts of Blockbuster - "What? People are pining for the bad guy again?!?"
the dim back room of the local video store with the curtain over it is what kept some of our local ones in business as long as they did. yes, that porn selection was quite profitable.
When Netflix had the star system, I would get amazing recommendations. I would get a good feeling every time I opened Netflix because I was almost guaranteed a quality movie I would like. After Netflix moved onto thumbs up/down it was never the same and when Netflix started promoting their own shows, it got worse. I'm at the point where I hardly even watch it though I can't say the same for my kids.
I miss the comments the most. Seeing why someone rated something a certain way.
I don't even remember that.
Another trip down memory lane. Remember when you could comment on other people's amazon comments? Those comments were the best. I would often scroll through comments until I came to one with a long chain of replies. Then I would really have a good insight on what I may purchase.
Compounded by moving away from massive dvd back catalog to limited streaming options. Not only are the recommendations worse but there is significantly less for them to recommend.
I think what a lot of us are missing is human interaction, especially with strangers. No one is going to reminisce about that time the Netflix algorithm recommended a movie to them. Interactions with others, the stories and sense of community that can come out of it, not to mention building social skills, is being lost.
We're making a better world for consumers, but sometimes I wonder if it's a better world for people.
> 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?
Do you have anything constructive to say or are you just going to be a jerk?
Eraserhead wasn’t exactly a dud for me but it was deeply discomfiting and disturbing (clearly as intended.) Glad I’ve seen it, but very little interest in seeing it again.
Well.
I would agree. You have to see it at least once to appreciate it :)
So many times visiting the video store as a kid, we'd get up to the counter and before the info was scanned or logged to the computer, the guy would say to my mum about her choice:
"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.
I think there’s something to be said for the interaction involved in getting a recommendation from a human. An AI might recommend movies just as well as Dave did, but you presumably like Dave and enjoy talking to him about the movies you’ve seen. You don’t get that part of the experience with an AI recommendation.
My friend managed a Video rental shop in the sunset of the the era. I remember him mentioning some trade publication, or magazine from the franchise that told employees ' if you like this movie, you'll probably like this too' kind of information.. Maybe the algorithms were already around back then, just the front end was a bit meatier.
What's the website equivalent of Dave? Surely it has to exist somewhere? Maybe it's not personalized for you but it's close enough for a lot of people?
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"
IMO website equivalent of this is cinephile forums/trackers. You will get tons of high quality recommendations and find interesting non-mainstream content.
Agreed. And once you have a list of interesting contenders, sites like justwatch.com will help you track down where you can find them.
Worth a shot! After visiting it seems more like I'm training the thing rather than the thing helping me, but it's certainly interesting!
Now I'm thinking of the massive amount of content locked up in VHS tapes that future generations will probably never see due to copyright + lack of resources. I bet there's some absolute gems there.
Indeed, if it's only on VHS, it'll be degraded past watchability by the time of future generations. VHS doesn't last.
I was very surprised when I walked by a video rental store the other night. Most of them are gone now, of course, but apparently a few of them still survive.
Blockbuster, though, no.
Old "Dave" has something AI doesn't: artist's intuition.
now i want to see a GPT-3 based "Dave" wrapper-ui for netflix/hulu
dave doesn’t extract the most capital or something like that
That's kind of both the upside and the downside to capitalism, I guess.
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.
Growing up in the 80s with VHS, Betamax, Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls), and being a dj in the late 90s when the thought of a "USB stick instead of traveling with all this vinyl was an impossibility", makes this whole nostalgia tour a fun one. I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions.
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).
One of the most noticeable things about playing laserdiscs on modern displays is the poor black levels and noise in shadows, and of course the difficulty in scaling interlaced material. Even with what should be a decent (but not nearly top of the line) FPGA-based deinterlacer/scaler I still feel like it should look better than it does, given how much better laserdisc resolution can be than VHS. But it's also analog video, and discs can degrade, as well as components in players going out-of-spec and increasing noise. I still like them, and there's something nice about large gatefold packaging, and these giant discs.
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.
Like you said, Laserdisc was way better than either tape format. But if you watched it on a Trinitron television, you noticed all the same artifacts you have.
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.
I think the only laserdisc I ever watched was at a friend's house: the original Star Wars. And what I most remember about that viewing was seeing artifacts in the intro credits (a Galaxy far far away...), particularly how the text was very noticeably quantized to scan lines.
Non-special edition Star Wars was also available on VHS from same vintage as LD, but the thx remaster vhs version was best analog version imo. Although I fondly remember the taped off tv vhs versions I grew up watching. Fan versions of theatrical versions are amazing!
i'm sure there's a device somewhere you can insert inline to convert the colorspace from 601 to 709 for SD->HD. or change the picture profile on your monitor to help compensate for the 7.5IRE SD black.
It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.
There’s a video floating around out there somewhere from the 80s show Knight Rider. One of the things about that car was that it could drive itself. I always assumed they used some sort of complex remote control system to film those scenes, but the video clearly shows that it’s just a guy wearing a suit that looks like the seat in the car. I guess simple wins out over cool.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...
That’s awesome: the author of that tweet is a friend of mine and a journalist out of Toronto. Small world.
This is only strictly true if you're talking about television. The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers. But it was definitely better than anything seen on a television prior to at least 1080p if not 4k.
The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers.
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.
A couple of years ago, I was lucky to see Lowrence of Arabia in a local cinema with a 70 mm film projector. The film was originally shot on 65mm and it looked fabulous on the big screen! I don’t remember the film grain being an issue. I usually notice it at the start of the film but then quickly get used to it. It’s also likely that the picture quality was cleaned to some degree.
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.
A big difference is that the prints degrade and viewing conditions varied greatly. If you were watching Lawrence first run on 70mm print at large theater with the projector lamps cranked it was borderline religious experience. But if you weren’t in a big city and caught the end of the second or third run or a 35mm print with lamps at normal levels 4k on a newer tv is almost certainly better.
It's part of the Progress Quest™ style transfer from audiophiles trying to maximize numbers to videophiles trying to maximize numbers. Audiophiles are listening to music in "better" quality than the people who made it had through their monitors, and people are watching movies in "better" quality than the directors saw their final cuts in.
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.
Television that was made on film has held up pretty well.
I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.
Are you watching the original or the remaster?
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!
They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series).
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.
I don't know about Buffy but some later Star Trek series like Deep Space 9 will be really hard to remaster because they were shot on video instead of film. The detail just isn't there to be enhanced.
Deep Space 9 was also shot on film. The editing, effects, and mastering were completed on video (same for TNG). This is true for nearly every 1-hour US prime-time drama of that era (Buffy, X-Files, etc).
https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-spac...
I really wish for a ds9 remaster, which supposedly could be done in 16:9 since they were much more careful to not have mics etc inside the larger frame while filming.
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
I think maybe the problem is that DS9, especially the latter seasons, made much heavier use of effects, since it was entering the CGI era?
An this unfortunately also makes a remaster of VOY and DS9 very unlikely. I also read somewhere that they used more digital effects and 3D renders which makes a remaster even more difficult, as it would basically require to update or even redo them.
Theatres were a thing back then. But ye concerning TV you are right. My best example of that is playing Ocarina of Time on a big modern TV ... it was so much more impressive on a small ctr.
For video games, there's another factor: much of the artwork in old-school games was specifically designed to be altered by both CRT scanlines and NTSC composite effects. So many sprites in 2D games and textures in 3D games rely on NTSC effects to antialias the graphics and turn dithering into real gradients and you're missing out on so much with a modern screen.
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).
Modern upscalers/HDMI conversion devices with retro consoles in mind like the retrotink offer the ability to add scanlines as well. So it is possible on real hardware for those that care enough.
So I basically have two concerns with that:
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.
RGB output is commonly desired in the retro gaming community. And RGB mods on the SNES and other consoles are commonly done. I've personally used HD Retrovisions component SNES (so RGB out) cables on a CRT and IMO the results look fantastic. Hell Nintendo themselves sold RGB cables for the Super Famicom and SNES in Europe. NTSC composite effects were a much bigger part of older 8 bit machines. Much less so on later consoles especially as expectations of the game heading to PAL regions rose.
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.
Yeah, video games are probably even worse off than movies. If you're playing on original hardware, most modern TVs don't scale them properly and they look terrible. There are external upscalers and RGB modding, but it's an expensive and esoteric thing to dig in to.
Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen
Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.
> 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.
Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.
It's easier to suspend your disbelief when you can't see the little squares around the TIE Fighter as it attacks the Millennium Falcon.
Older 'practical' special effects still hold up better than much more recent early CGI though. Even if you can tell that something is a physical model, IMO it still looks 100x better than a poorly rendered and animated low-poly 3d effect.
Even modern CG is garbage and suffers from the uncanny valley effect.
I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.
The Blu-Ray release of Star Trek TNG suffers from this a ton -- it was great seeing one of my favorite childhood TV shows in high def but it made all of the costumes, makeup, and sets look so fake!
> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions.
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.
Really? I did.
- 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.
> Really? I did.
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 was talking about video quality, not that other stuff.
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).
Back here in Asia, aka land of the pirates and DivX, we could quickly moved to CDs, CDRs and VCDs. I think the huge proliferation of VCDs in Asia stunted the spread of DVDs for quite some time because they were just so cheap.
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 remember purchasing a Dolby pro logic processor and thinking I had unlocked some new home theater super dimension.
and now we have 4k and ATMOS
> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then
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 don't know, VHS Hi-Fi wasn't bad. It had a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz and signal-to-noise ratio about 70 dB.
Maybe. That wasn’t used by regular VHS rigs though was it (ie PAL or NTSC recordings)?
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.
VHS has a mono track and a stereo track. Some copies have only the mono track, some setups use only the mono track, ever. My Harry Potter 2 copy has a garbled stereo track, so I manually switch to mono when watching that.
From why I understand of VHS (and I could be wrong here since I’ve not written software to read VHS tapes) is that they don’t have a separate audio track. They just encode NTSC or PAL signals as it would be broadcast over the airwaves. That means audio will be encoded in the signal after the video frame. It also means Teletext is also recorded too (which has been useful for Teletext achievers / historians).
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)
Eh, no. Think about it. If the audio was encoded in the video signal, it would need to be buffered. (Such systems existed, but not in VHS.) Audio in VHS is a continuous analog thing.
But no need to speculate:
You’re thinking digitally. PAL and NTSC are analogue formats. In fact that link you cited even says that’s VHS stores the PAL or NTSC signal verbatim and what I described is exactly how PAL and NTSC store audio.
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.
I am not thinking digitally.
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.
You're literally now just saying the same thing I was! It was a different frequency on the same signal. I never said it was chopped between frames! That's some weird conclusion you came to all by yourself. Hence why I said you're thinking digitally rather than of an analogue signal. Or at least not realising a broadcast transmission is broadband rather than narrowband.
My mistake then. I triggered on what you wrote "That means audio will be encoded in the signal after the video frame."
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
I've known guys in the past that kept audio recordings on VHS, just for that reason.
> Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls)
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.
I ripped my entire DVD collection 15 years ago, and I just never watch any of it. If I want to watch one of the movies I just pay the $4 to 'rent' a 4k stream instead of suffering with DVD quality.
It’s so funny reading this. I was remarking the other day to a friend how well I think DVD’s hold up. Nothing to write home about, but definitely a solid level above “tolerable” to me.
Man I am the exact opposite. If I have had it on DVD, I've ripped it and I'd rather watch that, rather then pay $4 to rent any other stream of a product I already have.
It all depends on how close you sit. If you’re 12+ feet away, you may not be able to resolve the difference between 1080p and 4K, but at 6-8 feet away, I bet you can.
For me it's not so much the difference in resolution, but the fact that due to low resolution being the norm, all the on-screen text tend to be huge. This is readily noticeable for the credit text in TV shows (not so much for movies, which seem to have barely legible credit text going way back).
People get trained on what's supposed to be nice. There are people who will insist that anything less that 2K resolution on their computer monitor physically hurts their eyes and brain.
Blur can cause eye strain, and eye strain hurts. I don't think that's a weird thing to say.
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.
I guess? But once I went to two 2.5k 32”coupled with 120hz it was hard to go back. It didn’t “physically hurt” in a very noticeable way, but I’m also definitely less tired and leaning over less frequently now.
I think the endgame will be like music licensing, with a max royalty set by the government with a short exclusivity period. This is why smaller companies like deezer and tidal can compete with Apple Music, YouTube music, Spotify and still have substantially all of the same music
There is no government imposed royalty on "music" for on demand music.
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 was in Bend a few months ago and swung by the last Blockbuster. I rented a movie (and bought a t-shirt), and had to sign up for an account. I received a laminated paper Blockbuster card with an account number scrawled in Sharpie on the back. I wouldn't have guessed that the store was still calling out to these old servers; that's pretty cool.
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.
> inconsiderate about including the clerks
As in, rudely excluded the clerks, or rudely included? Either way makes sense me to me.
I would presume rudely including - I can imagine that those clerks have to deal with touristy photos on a daily basis and everyone wants to have the employee captured in their "Blockbuster experience" photo.
That's so cool and sounds like an awesome experience. I keep my Mom's original Blockbuster laminated card in the back of my iPhone case :) Just checked the print date and its from 9/24/04. Great piece of nostalgia.
Small world: 9/24/04 was the date on my first driver's license
Man, this job would be great, if it wasn't for the fucking customers!
If all they're doing is taking pictures and leaving, they're not customers.
It is a reference to the film Clerks, which features a video rental store employee who utters this quote.
I live a few blocks from that place. It's kind of weird all the attention it gets.
In 2007 I was in the US Army, deployed to the Middle East. (My memory is a bit hazy, it could have been my 2009 deployment instead.) Netflix was shipping DVD's to rent but they wouldn't ship to my APO AE address. I discovered that Blockbuster had a similar program, and they would ship to my APO AE address. So for six months or so, I was renting movies from Blockbuster on the other side of the world.
It's sort of bizarre that an entrenched, widely despised corporate behemoth thoroughly deserving its own demise has turned into an anachronistic mom-and-pop shop that just gets by. But isn't this the worst of both worlds? It's dystopian nostalgia. Maybe I just have too much of a grudge against the 1980's...
I grew up in the 90's and have nothing but warm fuzzy memories of renting a movie on Friday night and watching in the living room with my family, eating popcorn and candy.
I think there's probably a lot of people who have that from their childhood.
Parent is referencing how Blockbuster put all the local video stores out of business, like Walmart and Main Street America.
It happened with record stores, too, via Tower Records and other national chains I can’t remember now
Good record stores outlasted Tower Records. What failed were record stores which were basically Tower records, only watered down weaker versions.
Good bookstores didn't outlast Borders/Barnes & Noble/Books-a-Million etc. (or at least 90% of them didn't.) It was really annoying when people were mourning the destruction of 15 year old book warehouses by Amazon, when I was still mourning 100 year old bookstores.
I don't go to bookshops anymore. Books are just a commodity now, they push the latest product for a few weeks and move on the next. It is all part of the hype machine. After a month or so it's like the book never existed at all- it had it's five minutes of fame.
On the other side of the counter, my wife (girlfriend at the time) worked at BB in HS. Even by minimum wage, teen job, retail standards it was awful. She loathed it. I'll bet if I even just say the word "blockbuster" to her three decades later she'll give me a stink eye.
That part was great. Getting charged late fees because you didn't have it back at 8:00AM sharp (or whatever) sucked.
They also had quite a markup on those snacks. Not movie theater levels, but a lot higher than the convenience store.
I don't really view that as evil though, just basic market dynamics.
Similarly, CVS sells cheerios for $7 a box. I don't think CVS is evil, sometimes I'm just lazy.
I totally agree with you, but there are people who refuse to see it that way. If there was an ice cream cart at the bottom of the Grand Canyon selling a scoop of ice cream for $10, some people would be outraged. Never mind that it's a remote location, it's very difficult to supply ice cream there, it's incredibly convenient to be able to buy ice cream there, etc.
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...
Convenience stores also generally have a markup versus grocery stores. That they had a markup above that was always a bit questionable. My recollection is that over time they switched to some more niche candies, things you couldn't necessarily find down the street and so the apples-to-oranges problem gave them a bit of an excuse.
Same, Growing up in the US, I also have warm memories of TGIF, where we'd watch Family Matters together as a family on Friday night.
Wait, did TGIF go away too?! :(
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.
Poster above you is talking about a block of TV programming called TGIF as well.
The fast casual restaurant chain still exists, and is definitely still cartoonishly embellished with Americana, and surprisingly decent food for what it is.
Still, not once has the United Nations passed a resolution to fund the building of TGI Fridays franchises in South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly everyone lacks access to warm, inviting restaurants with vibrant Americana-themed decor [1] https://www.theonion.com/tgi-fridays-is-a-human-right-182535...
Lol! They jest, but TGIF was literally my main reference for "America" before I visited for the first time. They do a better job propagandizing than VoA for sure.
They had a TGI Fridays on the US military bases in Afghanistan.
Ahhh, thanks for the clarification. I'm glad the restaurant is still around.
I did as well. While helping set up my parents (now Grandma and Grandpa) on our Disney+ and Netflix plans, we discussed the demise of Blockbuster.
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.
The way I see it, there are really two Blockbusters. One is an evil corporate behemoth, the other is the neighborhood video store that lives on in our memories. These guys aren't keeping Blockbuster running so much as they are keeping the nostalgic memory of it going.
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.
I don't purchase movies anymore but I could see myself going to a store to rent a 4K blu-ray to get the commentary tracks. Those are hard to come by online.
That's one of the things that kills me about present day distribution. There is such a massive hole in not getting to hear from the creators the way you could with DVDs. Shows like The Simpsons, etc. have offered a massive amount of information presented through commentary, that wouldn't otherwise be known.
When I was a kid I'd watch Futurama on DVD with commentary and think "Wow I bet one day I'll be able to pause any movie and click on anything and get all the info about it." I can't believe we went the opposite direction.
This is one thing Amazon does well. Pause almost anything and it will show you the actors presently on screen (with headshots, which you can click on to get more info.
They'll also name the song playing, if any.
Eh, that's not really anything you couldn't do with google almost as easily. I mean real multimedia. I want to pause Lord of the Rings, click on a sword, and get the passage where the sword is described in the book. I want to click on a character and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the costume. I want it all.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu, but for film.
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.
Googling opens you up to spoilers.
I once confused "No Way Home" with "Far From Home" and ended up spoiling the one I hadn't seen yet. :/
That sounds like a bunch of work for very little return, not any new technology.
I guess the other side of that coin is I feel like we have more access to creators than ever with youtube and podcasts. If I want to "meet my heroes" so to speak, I don't need DVD extras, I can just watch them in all sorts of formats online. Pre internet, you couldn't really watch Scorcese on hot ones.
Picture this- you walk into a Blockbuster and only the cardboard covers are on the shelves. You touch one and a ML-driven camera begins a preview of the movie on a nearby screen. You can chat with anyone else there of course. When you find something you like, you take the cardboard cover (recyclable of course) out of the store and another ML-driven camera records the transaction and automatically bills you for the rental, then sets up a stream of it at your home on their app running on your device (appletv or whatever). (If you don't actually want the cardboard cover you can deposit it into a box outside the store, but the nominal cost of them is low enough that the store wouldn't care if you actually brought it home.)
Best of both worlds?
I think that Dish doesn't want to sell the rights, at least not for a small sum. In the documentary "The Last Blockbuster", they discuss how the rights to continue to use the name for the store are renegotiated every X amount of years (I think it's 3?) and that if the deal doesn't go through that it's essentially the end of the store.
Funny because there were the same 2 sides to the cable companies. Your closest shop and your TV’s internet was out connection to the culture.
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.
Double so since something like Redbox could have definitely used the brand.
They could have bought the Blockbuster brand, and combined it into a gawdy 80s style amalgamam of purple (you know, blue plus red)...and called it something like BoxBuster! And beyond dvd rentals, sell Roku devices. But, alas! ;-)
Yeah, ironic because Blockbuster is what killed off the mom and pop stores it now stands in for in our collective memory of the 90s.
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.
This reminds me of smaller bookstores prior to the era of Borders and Barnes and Noble dominance. pours one out
Smaller bookstores are actually doing pretty okay these days: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/02/18/indie-bookstores-com...
Mostly because Amazon decimated corporate chains, which freed up more market for independent stores.
Though independents are still a pretty niche business. Around where I am there are certainly far fewer of them than there were before the big chains became dominant.
I don't know. I'm in a pretty redneck county and even here there are dozen independent bookstores.
Most of them are tied to a coffeeshop though. But if you check your local map you might be surprised.
Even the article said there were 10-15 bookstores in a place that had 35 of them in the 70s.
How are they still in business, by the way? It seemed like they were just a Starbucks location with a ton of overhead, I thought we'd seen the last of them when pandemic shut everything down.
I loved B&N by the way, more computer-related books than WaldenBooks, but not as many as Borders.
> How are they still in business, by the way?
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.
Around the time of the pandemic they implemented a strategic change to have local management arrange the store rather than auctioning shelf placement to publishers like most other retailers do. This has actually made B&N pretty nice to browse compared to a few years ago.
Because "Starbucks with overhead" is a surprisingly effective business model apparently; though if you go into one you'll notice that there are a lot more chotchkeys for sale near the front of the store (even LEGO lol).
> Blockbuster is what killed off the mom and pop stores
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.
Starbucks grew the "expensive coffee" market, and so independents had a niche to slip into (expensive, but not Starbucks) - Blockbuster did nothing to grow the "rental movie" market, and a given market in an area is roughly limited to the number of houses in said market.
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)).
I distinctively remember around 1994 two family run stores in the UK town I grew up in disappearing and the reason was the same, Blockbuster.
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 reason was the same, Blockbuster.
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.
Yeah that's how I remember it too. In one town we lived in, we always got videos from the independent place. My main memory of Blockbuster is that one time my parents went there instead, and they gave us the wrong movie, which my sister and I were very disappointed by.
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.
the wikipedia article for blockbuster contains a quote/source about this (search it for "mom and pop") but the citation no longer exists due to link rot.
essentially blockbuster operated at larger scales than many small video businesses and so had smaller unit costs while also having more selection.
I loved when Blockbuster came to town because it cut the price of rentals by two thirds. I was not a wealthy child and being able to rent a game every few weeks was way better than every couple of months.
How is that ironic? Memories of the 90’s woupd be all about the demise of mom and pop shops and generally flattening the character of US cities and towns (see also Starbucks).
It’s more discomforting than ironic.
The local video rental proprietor told me when she was closing up for good was that Netflix destroyed her business.
Anecdotally, I recall a brief moment in the late 2000's where the mom and pop shops had a bit of resurgence (or at least a stay on their execution) -- when Netflix DVD's by mail had put most Block Busters out of business, but before every movie was readily available on streaming services.
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.
NYC probably had more indie rental stores around just because of the population density. In my suburb, Blockbuster had already wiped them out in the 90's.
Feels like even without streaming or even Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail delivery service, Redbox could’ve eaten brick and mortar movie rental stores.
According to a coworker, Redbox/Outerwall had massive management issues, which probably explains why they had so much trouble. He insisted that the corporate culture got significantly better when private equity bought them out, which is a statement I don't recall ever having heard before.
I don't recall Redbox existing, at least in my area, during that time.
This was before Netflix streaming, when Netflix was just dvds.
Yeah -- still don't remember Redbox then. I did use Netflix DVDs by mail, too.
It is weird. I think it's a stand-in for nostalgia for lost media formats and the experience they engendered. I have a lot of fuzzy feelings about it, because it was an event on Friday when my parents would take us there, or my dad would stop by after work and get movies or video games. I would just about shit myself when he finally got a copy of Super Mario All-Stars or Earthbound. When I was a little older it was close enough that I could ride my bike there.
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.
Since I'm obsessed with the recent 80's resurgence(acknowledging that this reflection of the 1980's is much more polished than the original) I'm curious, what's your grudge against the 1980's?
> widely despised
Wait? It was? I grew up through the 90s and have nothing but fond memories of Blockbuster
Yeah I personally hated blockbuster because they sent me to collections over like $9 in late fees I didn’t know I had. People have fond memories but I have nearly none of video rentals. Long lines, poor selection, and over priced… along with bullshit “late fees,” I can say I am happy they failed. Truly video rental stores were not great, and I dunno why people remember them like they were.
Yeah, likewise. What I'm noticing in the comments is people who say, "My parents would take me there on Fridays..." seem to be nostalgic for it, but for those of us who were adults, we ran into the things you talk about.
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.
Also they didn't stock gory horror, 99.9% of foreign films, classics, or porn. If Blockbusters shut down your local video store, you just weren't going to be able to watch a wide variety of movies anymore (until Netflix's DVDs by mail came along.)
Mostly rose-colored glasses nostalgia probably. Being able to rent a movie whenever[0] you wanted to and watch it at home was extremely transformative in a way that someone who grew up with streaming (not you I realize) would find difficult to appreciate. A lot of movies weren't even purchasable as a practical matter (priced to rent) at the time.
[0] Well, if they had it and it was in stock.
They'd even rent VCRs and DVD players, which was a big deal early on when they were multiple hundreds of dollars.
They'd rent video game consoles too.
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...)
https://www.gamefly.com exists but I feel it's days are numbered, what with console makers doing everything they can to tie games to accounts tied to a given console ...
Before video rental stores, we rented a film projector at the public library and movies on reel-to-reel film. Small selection of old stuff like Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, etc.
A lot of the people who have fond recollections of video rental stores are because they were kids at the time, going to the video store was associated with Friday nights and family movie time for a lot of kids.
I'm sure their parents who were responsible for rewinding the tapes, late fees, etc. remember the video stores less fondly.
The 80's will always love you
My fondest Blockbuster memories were around video games. The very best weekends were when my mom would take us there on Friday after school and let us each pick out a game. My sister and I would fight for turns with the TV all weekend.
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.
Or getting hooked on a game and hoping that you get there quick enough to check it out so that no one else played or erased your save.
I miss Blockbuster. We had a small haven here called Family Video, but they unfortunately closed down due to the COVID lockdowns/lack of foot traffic. It was my family's spot to grab a Friday night movie and snacks, even through the pandemic. We were super bummed to see it go. Streaming just doesn't match the experience of browsing movies IRL. We'd usually leave with a few movies to watch that week, including a kids movie for the kids. We typically give up on endlessly browsing Netflix/etc. for something interesting and fall back to our "usual." Boring.
Hoping similar stores make a resurgence someday.
Our rental store closed before Covid (the owner basically got tired of it and retired, it wasn't a big money-maker, so nobody took over). Our theater died just after Covid.
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.
Alamo Drafthouse offers a lot of this.
I love this place! Too bad the one near me also closed down during the lockdowns. It was a relatively new location too.
Have you ever seen the post with the person that accidentally stumbled into a film set with an old Blockbuster "revived", heh
If you want your mind blown - "Who really killed Blockbuster Video?"
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.
Or if BBC would have gone ahead with video-on-demand from an array of LaserDisc players distributing to optical (analogue!) fiber in London.
In the 80s.
I run IT for a franchise chain. All requests to me are supposed to come through corporate, but franchisees and sometimes managers and even front desk employees try to do end-runs and get directly to me with software issues, local networking issues, etc. I want to stress how difficult this would be for one person to manage, and how much work for little pay it probably was if it was based on service contracts with individual stores. At least, when there were 30 independent Blockbusters left. Now it's probably pretty chill.
I worked at a corporate Blockbuster for just over a year during high school. I made $7.15/hr and I commuted using my bicycle. Best job I ever had.
I read this title as "Piano man..." several times until my brain finally parsed it correctly. It made for very curious thoughts on an alternate future involving Billy Joel.
I thought I was the only one.
Nope. I earnestly clicked the link wondering how in the world Billy Joel was keeping Blockbuster Video alive. LOL.
Lend me a tape, you're the video man. Lend me a film tonight.
'cause we're all in the mood for a movie, and we'll be rewinding all night.
> “It’s the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night: ‘Oh my gosh, what happens if we run out of computers?’” he said. “Well, it is what it is. It’s just going to run until it doesn’t run anymore.”
Couldn't he just virtualize? There is USB-Floppy devices, these days, to get even the last bit of compatibility right.
I wonder how many conversations there were in the 80s or 90s about how video on demand would never become mainstream because of the bandwidth requirements.
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?"
Don't know if it's been mentioned or not, but what killed the video store for me was the late fees. Hollywood Video had a parking lot drop box that was good up until midnight. I worked the overnight shift so I would drop the seen vids at 9:15pm and then drive off to work. Almost every time they would charge me a late fee! When I would call them on the fee, they always dropped it, making me wonder about the other people who wouldn't protest.
Also, many times I witnessed exasperated parents and grandparents paying a huge late fee because their kids forgot to drop them off.
It's like the business version of the Byzantine Empire.
Un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/jotV3
Or you can just click on "Reader View" from Safari....
"Reader View" from Safari only shows the first paragraph of this story for me
Thanks. Not only is the original link paywalled it is also not accessible from EU because GDPR and they think it is easier to block us than to not have so much third party cookies or such :sad:
Weird, from EU also, not paywalled nor geofenced for me.
The geofence code only kicked in when I was about halfway through the article.
Seems buggy as fuck.
Blame your government. The only thing that the 99 section/11 chapter GDPR accomplished was to make the web worse with shitty Cookie notices.
Websites don't need notices if they're not doing anything shady or unnecessary tracking, and just about every cookie notices I see is going against either the wording or the intent of the law.
If they want to be annoying on purpose, we should blame them, not the GDPR.
So it's an effective law just not effectively enforced. Isn't that a distinction without a difference?
I'm not saying it's effective (yet), but if companies respond to a law by doing something very obnoxious and not at all required by the law, I point my blame at the companies.
GDPR has proven incredibly useful to me and others in imposing cost on organisations and businesses that want to fuck about with our data.
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.
Facebook and Google didn't announce any harm from the GDPR. There are many companies that announce lower earning expectations from a simple 5 line App Store change by Apple and a one time popup asking you whether you want to be tracked.
FAANG aren't who I am thinking of here - much worse are the background check and risk reporting companies such as WorldCheck that maintain dossiers on you that can often be not much more than speculative fanfiction, which banks use to assess risk.
Welp at least he doesn’t have any scaling issues. Scaled down to the minimal set.
Funny someone is doing the same with Radioshack and Crypto [0].
No, RadioShack brand is just being used for a trend. Not even related to keeping their technology or stores open/alive in 2022.
RIP RadioShack
Not only that, the person behind defiling the brand is none other than Tai Lopez (the "here in my garage ... KNOWLEDGE!" guy)
Brand necrophilia.
Excellent name for it
As a Gen X'er, this is completely gross
Do you think he had to recreate blockbuster's central servers from scratch or did he get the blessing to maintain the old software?
Blockbuster is old enough that they probably didn't have "central servers" as such, more like a local area terminal network that you'd manually update with CSV files when needed.
I wish they had included pictures of his hardware.
Stan Marsh