My parents owned a mom/pop video store during my childhood. It's still crazy to look back at how in-demand VHS tapes were. We lived in a super small town so there was zero competition. Cable was not common in every home yet.
"Be kind, rewind" cost a buck if forgotten. Rewinding to the beginning of VHS tapes was honestly so long that nobody really forgot.
The store was eventually acquired by some regional chain, and almost like magic the future started taking its form.
So cool to see this.
So, you needed to rewind the tape to the beginning if you wanted to return it after having partially watched it i.e. at 40%? Now I wonder, did the store owners check each tape on return for this? I hope it was a quick process..
> 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
Further wrinkle: it only took a long time in your VCR, which (we all believed) was also bad for your VCR (I mean, maybe? But avoiding stressing the VCR's mechanism was why it took a long time). So, gadget catalogs sold standalone high-speed VCR rewinders, which just about anyone who watched a lot of movies owned. They took less than a minute to rewind a cassette.
It took about 3 seconds to check. Pop open the case the tapes came in and look at the plastic window and you can easily see both reels. If the tape was all on the left reel, it was rewound. Just about all rental places did this when you returned the tape. Audio cassette tapes were the same way. The VHS cassette was basically just a larger version of an audio cassette with wider and longer tape.
Interestingly, in the very first iteration of home video cassette rentals, the tapes could not be rewound at home:
> 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.
What I remember is that it was a cultural part of movie watching to rewind when the credits hit. You'd use that time to discuss what you saw with whoever you were viewing with. That's how I did it.
I recall them having a transparent window so you could see where the tape was. I think the process would have been: slide the VHS out of the sleeve and glance at where the tape was positioned. Should take just a second.
You can tell by looking at a VHS tape if it's been rewound or not; there are two little windows that let you see the tape reels, and all of the black stuff should be in the left window.
Lucky that your parent's shop got acquired. It was amazing to see - Blockbuster shops popping up here and there, all the while it seemed that virtually everyone could see the tsunami coming (except Blockbuster).
Outside of going to the movies, Blockbuster was pretty much my sole source of video.
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.
it’s crazy to think VHS and DVD came and went in only a few decades
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.
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.
> There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals.
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.
What I found better about it was the algorithm-free browsing experience. You would just look at the shelves and decide what to watch. The movies were broken down into basic genres, and sometimes there would be "staff picks" or something, but beyond that it was just you and the movies. This meant sometimes you watched really bad stuff, or good stuff, or stuff you wouldn't normally watch, or whatever.
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.
The only thing we can do, as consumers, is stop paying for streaming, pay/rent physical media, and if we truly “need” on-demand streaming then piracy is always a moral option to abusive multi-billion dollar businesses. A $5/mo VPN is far more value than you can get out of streaming, especially if you invest the saved money into a Jellyfin server.
This is beautiful. What warm memories this evokes. Now I can adjust the dimensions and make some dust covers for my books in the Blockbuster video style!
Renting a movie with Mom and Dad was a special kind of excitement as a kid.
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.
Even renting digitally had a certain intimacy and enjoyment to it. The wait was exciting. Picking out what you wanted, waiting to get home/have it arrive in the mail let the mind explore the movie and build a personal connection to it, something that streaming just doesn’t fulfill to me.
I feel like it should instead link to a video in the sling.com domain with almost patronizing instructions on how to convert their login to Sling and promote it as "Your very own Blockbuster at home".
From a Blockbuster shareholder perspective, that would be good. From a user perspective, streaming is nothing like video rental and I don't see why we should expect them to be the same company. Why should a rental company that pivots to streaming be better for overall society than a native streaming company (which Netflix isn't, I note).
The idea is that Blockbuster already had strong relationships with practically all the makers. Transitioning to streaming would have been very hard, but coming into the market with preexisting relationships would have been a huge advantage.
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.
Netflix started out as a DVD rental service. The model was slightly different with a subscription that allowed you to have a certain number of DVDs at once, but it was still renting discs.
If they could pivot from rentals to streaming, why couldn't Blockbuster have done it?
lol this brings back memories. Spent 5 years working in BBV in high school and college, my first day on the job was when they installed dvd shelves in the middle of the store, was there when we removed all VHS, was there when Netflix streaming began and when we launched our own streaming service. Good times.
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> 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
Pic of rewound VHS: https://www.becomingminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
That explains www.blockbuster.com linking Sling TV.
Doesn't mean the trademarks aren't valid, though. Here, there be [legal] dragonnes...
https://bendblockbuster.com/new-releases/
the Alaska blockbuster did close though.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/cE9MCA7TZAdwYSkB6
We SHOULD have been streaming on Blockbuster and not Netflix today, but history is just a chain of blunders stitched together.
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.
If they could pivot from rentals to streaming, why couldn't Blockbuster have done it?