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I'm wondering if anybody managed a video store 30 years ago. I have the macro figured out, but have a few questions. What catalogue or catalogues did video rental stores in the 80s an early 90s order new VHS tapes from? Were there many, or just one for all stores? Does whatever entity that ran the catalogue back then still exist? More specifically, how did stores chose their indie content? Did it appear in the same catalogue, or did they obtain product from film festivals or through other means? Obviously the big blockbusters would come out regularly, but I remember the stores I used to go to always had a staff picks section and usually had an indie or cult section that had very limited release films. How were these specific tapes sourced?
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Jun 4, 2021 05:23
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IIRC, small video stores just bought new video tapes. They didn't have contracts to buy things at wholesale or anything like that because they weren't retailers. So they bought from wherever the public would buy from. The big places, like Blockbuster, had special deals with the studios that allowed them to buy en masse.
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Jul 5, 2021 17:31
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I know ours, at the pharmacy at Howard's, had no contracts with anyone. They bought retail tapes, as Waltzing Along says, and rented them along. Later, they did the same with DVDs. Only stopped when the pharmacy itself closed its doors about a decade ago. Knew someone who worked there.
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Jul 7, 2021 03:29
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You should probably not open a video rental store, the business seems to be declining
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Jul 7, 2021 19:22
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mobby_6kl posted:You should probably not open a video rental store, the business seems to be declining Exactly! The market's been left wide open for the taking.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:55
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https://web.archive.org/web/20010331112934/http://videostoremag.com:80/ You wanna peek behind the curtain, find somebody with a siterip of the late video store magazine forums
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Jul 14, 2021 22:04
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Some video stores definitely had some kind of distributor they bought from, because they'd have promotional material like posters for new releases and cardboard standups.
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Jul 14, 2021 23:55
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Also, VHS tapes were typically priced to rent. That's why they cost $100 bucks when they first hit the market. And then after a few months, they would be priced for the typical consumer.
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Jul 16, 2021 03:49
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Cemetry Gator posted:Also, VHS tapes were typically priced to rent. That's why they cost $100 bucks when they first hit the market. And then after a few months, they would be priced for the typical consumer. I visted a local rental store back when Star Wars first came out on VHS. Full-screen version priced at $139.95. The owner couldn't keep them in stock.
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Jul 16, 2021 12:45
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That area behind the curtain? That's where they kept the porns
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Jul 16, 2021 22:22
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I worked in a store that sold CDs/tapes but maybe 1/4 of its business was video sales, so I guess I'm as qualified as it's gonna get.... As I recall, a big majority of videos came from the top 6 or so media conglomerates of the day (Sony, Universal, etc.) I'm pretty sure every place but the huge chains got the same catalogues, etc. and I imagine the various individual companies have combined and consolidated may times over since then (early 90s). The only indie content I can imagine us having is classical music and operas-- we specialized in that and apart from that only had the really big blockbusters that would sell reliably. (And softcore porn, for some reason.) As I recall, the stocking decisions seemed to be based on the owners' personal tastes, relationships with the sales people who would come in once every month or so, and requests by customers. As I recall, the big conglomerates also distributed most of the stuff that the indies made as well. There was a big catalogue we had in the back that listed every single CD that was distributed by the big guys, as well as the music videos-- I forget the name but it seemed like most very big record/video stores had them back around 1990. I knew a bunch of people who worked for our local artsy/alternative video store (which made tons and tons of money in the 90s). They sponsored the local film festival and based their selection largely on that. There were a handful of long-time employees there who seemed to make pretty much all the decisions and seemed to singlehandedly make the careers of a few semi-successful arthouse directors.
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Jul 17, 2021 04:42
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I dropped a rented VHS copy of Crimson Tide into a mop bucket once. I went to the video store inquiring “asking for a friend”about the replacement cost. The manager of the video store said that their videotapes came directly from the motion picture company, and the replacement cost was $92. He then told me to pass along to “my friend” to just purchase one for $19.99 and return that one...it wouldn’t be the same but he didn’t care...happened all the time.
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Jul 18, 2021 19:47
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When blockbuster came to our town all the small video stores preemptively had going out of business sales and I got a good assortment of NES games for cheap, including Kickle Cubicle.
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Jul 19, 2021 04:37
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IDK how bigger stores worked, but there was a rental place by my house in the early-mid 2000's that was independent. We got to know the owner because he mostly worked the counter himself, he said his process for stocking was: 1. Go to Blockbuster once every other week, take note of new major releases they have in stock. 2. Go buy copies of those releases from the big box stores to stock at his place 3. Browse other smaller video stores in the area for interesting stuff like anime, indie films, etc that Blockbuster didn't stock, so that his store had some unique draw. Rinse repeat. We pretty much stopped going to blockbuster entirely because this guy just had a much more interesting collection, also he almost never cycled out his old stuff so he still had NES/SNES for rental in like 2004 which was super cool. Great place, and outlived the blockbuster in the same strip mall. Not by much though because a few months later one of the employees hosed up using the hotplate in the breakroom and burned out the property. Pretty much a total loss of stock, guy told the local paper he was gonna sell his house and leave town. Fare thee well, rental store guy.
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Jul 20, 2021 22:11
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You'd get a phone book-like book of all the releases from each of the main distributors, much like Wizard magazine, and you'd order from that. Same for music stores.
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Jul 26, 2021 02:18
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Sydin posted:IDK how bigger stores worked, but there was a rental place by my house in the early-mid 2000's that was independent. We got to know the owner because he mostly worked the counter himself, he said his process for stocking was: That's how our local place worked. They had DVDs long before the big rental chains did because they just bought them from the store. They also had Laserdiscs for sale/rent before that, plus a huge selection of video games and hardware going back to the Atari 2600 . One-night rentals were $1.25 for games or movies, which was great in the Playstation era, because you could just rent a game for one night, burn it if it was any good and bring it back. You could also get extremely obscure and unrated films there, which the big stores didn't carry. We're also 99.9% certain that the owner was a bookie, as he was often at a desk in the back corner, talking quietly on the phone while writing things down in a ledger and somehow we didn't see a handful of $1.25 rentals paying for all of his employees and his perpetually new, fancy cars. Rentals there were probably so cheap because he added a few dollars to each one after the fact to launder his gambling money. He sold the place to a guy in the Marine reserves who also owned a LAN gaming center in 2004, and within a year the guy who bought it was called up and subsequently killed in Iraq. They closed fairly quickly after that as his widow had no interest in keeping the place open. Even if he hadn't died, investing in video rentals and LAN centers in mid-00s was not the best long term choice of businesses, as anyone who wasn't a luddite or delusional could feel the winds of change starting to blow. All of the video stores in the area were closed by 2010.
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Jul 26, 2021 20:43
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I watched some netflix Last Blockbuster documentary and when they were going into the history apparently Blockbusters big claim to fame was that they set up profit sharing agreements with all the studios so they go the tapes for cheap. All the indie stores were buying $100 VHS's and hoping they got to make a profit off them, while BB was getting money off every rental.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:47
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The_Franz posted:That's how our local place worked. They had DVDs long before the big rental chains did because they just bought them from the store. They also had Laserdiscs for sale/rent before that, plus a huge selection of video games and hardware going back to the Atari 2600 . One-night rentals were $1.25 for games or movies, which was great in the Playstation era, because you could just rent a game for one night, burn it if it was any good and bring it back. You could also get extremely obscure and unrated films there, which the big stores didn't carry. Not trying to get into  specifics about old tech, but was it extremely easy to burn PS1 discs? I only had an N64 so wasn't in the loop. A friend who would visit family in Hong Kong had binders full of copied Dreamcast games and it's my understanding the copy protection was a bit lacking and helped contribute to Sega's exit from consoles.
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Jul 28, 2021 23:18
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Not trying to get into Burning PS1 disks was pretty difficult. The copy protection used a wobble in the disk, which wouldn't be replicated when you copied the disk. For Sega Dreamcast, I think there was a backdoor that certain games had that let you copy over the contents of disks. By that point, Sega was in terrible shape. They lost the US market in the mid 90s due to the 32x and the Sega Saturn and how they pissed off a lot of retailers and developers. And apparently, the Dreamcast under performed in Japan.
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Jul 28, 2021 23:56
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Not trying to get into The Dreamcast copy protection could be defeated by just putting in a legit game and swapping discs during the startup screen. But I doubt that was a big factor in it's demise, Sega had made a lot of mistakes and burnt a lot of goodwill prior to the Dreamcast.
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Jul 29, 2021 02:31
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Not trying to get into "Just burning" a disc wasn't really possible in the Dreamcast sense, but modchips were $10 and seven solder points on a board still designed for human repair, and there were also reasonably cheap cheat devices that had the added feature of completely stopping the disc after the authenticity check had been done but before the game was loaded so that one could swap it out provided you crammed a wad of blu-tack into the drive open sensor that triggered a recheck if it wasn't pressed down. Less than the cost of a single major game, or less than the cost of a budget game and a half-hour of effort, would have you sorted, yet you were probably on dialup and ISOs were a multi-day download, so rentals or trading were how you got anywhere. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 06:51
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Cemetry Gator posted:Burning PS1 disks was pretty difficult. The copy protection used a wobble in the disk, which wouldn't be replicated when you copied the disk. Mod chips were cheap and trivial to install. Eventually they started implementing countermeasures to detect mod chips, but they were generally quickly patched out and a new generation of "stealth" chips quickly hit the market. Naturally out shady local video store sold and installed them.
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Jul 29, 2021 19:11
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Not trying to get into The PSX you needed a special chip installed. The Dreamcast was insanely easy. It was just like burning a CD-rom, as in you get a random CD-R and burn the game .iso on it. All you had to do was download an extension and you are good to go. Though it was easy it didn't contribute much to the Dreamcast "failing" as the software ratio was similar to that of other consoles. The Dreamcast failed because Sega simply ran out of money as they lacked the funds to compete in the console market of the 21st century. Prior to Sega announcing the end of the console, it was actually selling reasonably well in North America, but it performed poorly in Japan and Europe.
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Aug 13, 2021 01:36
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Nah, you didn't need a special chip to play burned PSX games. I used to disc swap burned discs on my PSX all the time back in the day. It just wouldn't work for multidisc games that didn't give you the option to make a save and then load it from the next disc.
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Aug 13, 2021 16:35
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Mandoric posted:"Just burning" a disc wasn't really possible in the Dreamcast sense, but modchips were $10 and seven solder points on a board still designed for human repair, and there were also reasonably cheap cheat devices that had the added feature of completely stopping the disc after the authenticity check had been done but before the game was loaded so that one could swap it out provided you crammed a wad of blu-tack into the drive open sensor that triggered a recheck if it wasn't pressed down. Less than the cost of a single major game, or less than the cost of a budget game and a half-hour of effort, would have you sorted, yet you were probably on dialup and ISOs were a multi-day download, so rentals or trading were how you got anywhere. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit this took me back guy. Thank you.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:14
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i had a friend who worked at blockbuster in the mid 90's, he had a beard but on the first day of his job and they made him go home and shave it off but allowed him to keep the mustache. im not sure what that has to do with video rentals but that was their policy.
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Aug 17, 2021 21:31
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Earwicker posted:i had a friend who worked at blockbuster in the mid 90's, he had a beard but on the first day of his job and they made him go home and shave it off but allowed him to keep the mustache. im not sure what that has to do with video rentals but that was their policy. I've never heard of this particular rule, but it's not surprising-- when Blockbuster first arrived, it had a very prissy, family-friendly public image. I'm not sure if the owners were Born-again, but as I recall, there were even a lot of pretty unobjectionable R-rated movies they refused to stock. At a time when most video stores still had a porn section in the back, that was pretty conspicuous.
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Aug 18, 2021 05:14
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I let my doctor know his office used to be a Blockbuster and he thought that was funny.
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Aug 18, 2021 05:32
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Dreamcast games had to be cracked and repacked to fit on cd-r, but once the disc image was out there you burnt it was DiscJuggler, which used some kind of obscure disc image format that was suited for burning DC games. PSX games were usually easy to copy if you had a modchip installed, just rip the image and burn it. Some games, like Wip3out had additional protection, so you had to rip the iso, then use a patcher to patch the iso and then burn it. That also added a sweet cracktro  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LMYz_TrDg
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Aug 19, 2021 12:26
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Not trying to get into As far as actually burning discs go, the PSX uses pretty fancy features of the CD-ROM XA format and so copying a disc using the software included your with CD burner probably wouldn't work the way it would for a TG-CD or SEGA CD title. CDRWIN could do it though easily, so once that was known copying PSX games was trivial. For burned games to actually work you needed a modded PlayStation or had to do the swap trick to bypass the security/region check that only worked with original media. Hyrax Attack! posted:A friend who would visit family in Hong Kong had binders full of copied Dreamcast games and it's my understanding the copy protection was a bit lacking and helped contribute to Sega's exit from consoles.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:39
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punk rebel ecks posted:The PSX you needed a special chip installed. The Dreamcast was insanely easy. It was just like burning a CD-rom, as in you get a random CD-R and burn the game .iso on it. All you had to do was download an extension and you are good to go. Commercial Dreamcast games actually shipped on special "GD-ROM" media, that could fit up to a gigabyte of data (as opposed to the ~650MB of a CD). So, you couldn't read them in a PC or do straight-across ISO copies, and Sega thought that'd be enough to keep people from pirating games. Unfortunately for them, this was right around the time home broadband got to a point where a lot of people could download 650MB ISOs. So, if a pirate group ripped the GD-ROM with a modded Dreamcast and found a way to get that gigabyte down to CD-size (with techniques that ranged from "we just pulled a bunch of unused junk, no visible changes", to "most of the cinematics are gone now") then it'd go out across the internet and people could just burn the game onto a CD-R anyway.
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Aug 28, 2021 19:00
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I still have a open honest to god video store in my town, it looks all but derelict. Ive never gone in but now im really interested in what they might have.
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Aug 29, 2021 12:29
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Earwicker posted:i had a friend who worked at blockbuster in the mid 90's, he had a beard but on the first day of his job and they made him go home and shave it off but allowed him to keep the mustache. im not sure what that has to do with video rentals but that was their policy. The gently caress? Was the video store in Saudi Arabia or what. My brother in law had to do exactly that for an oil rig supervisor job over there because he was a Christian.
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Aug 30, 2021 02:48
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Fuckstick posted:The gently caress? Was the video store in Saudi Arabia or what. My brother in law had to do exactly that for an oil rig supervisor job over there because he was a Christian. nope this was in mountain view, california. a suburb of san francisco arbitrary policies like that seemed pretty common at the time
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Aug 30, 2021 19:09
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I worked in the business and my family owned video stores from 1984 to I want to say 2001. I can answer any technical questions you guys have. Yes, I still know how to repair VHS tapes (at a hundred bucks a pop or with an outrageous rev share agreement you bet your rear end we repaired those fuckers until the plastic melted), still have my VHS repair kit! And I really regret selling the industrial popcorn machine in our last location. That machine was a beast. Also for content, it really depends on your location. I worked/managed/ family owned all together close to 30 stores in total. I'd be loading up on Kurosawa movies for artsy university locations and in the same order I'd be ordering tons of the Trio of Terror (Stallone, Arnie, Van Damme) for the outskirt areas and Disney movies for the suburbs etc. stab fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 03:03
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Bum the Sad posted:I watched some netflix Last Blockbuster documentary and when they were going into the history apparently Blockbusters big claim to fame was that they set up profit sharing agreements with all the studios so they go the tapes for cheap. All the indie stores were buying $100 VHS's and hoping they got to make a profit off them, while BB was getting money off every rental. Technically true. However even the mom and pop shops in the DVD era were able to join consortiums to purchase in rev share agreements with the major studios or through resellers (I want to say the company name was RenTrak but it's been 20 years) And honestly in the 80's, every video store was making money hand over fist, it was madness.
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Aug 31, 2021 03:15
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There was an episode of retronauts focusing on this topic. Mostly focusing on renting of games since it is a gaming podcast https://retronauts.com/article/1194/return-to-the-age-when-video-rental-stores-roamed-the-land-in-episode-218
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Aug 31, 2021 19:55
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stab posted:Technically true. It really was a sellers market at the time. Stores couldn't keep up with the demand since the idea of watching media whenever you want was such a novelty.
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Aug 31, 2021 20:07
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Did video stores like Blockbuster own their own buildings/land? Does the physical design of a video rental store somehow make it unsuitable for any other buisness? I ask because when the Blockbuster near where I grew up went out of business, nothing moved in to its sub-building of the major grocery store+attached strip mall that it was a part of. AND it has stayed vacant for at least 15 years, even though it's smack dab in the center of one of the wealthiest and fastest growing suburbs in the country.
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Aug 31, 2021 20:18
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Roumba posted:Did video stores like Blockbuster own their own buildings/land? Does the physical design of a video rental store somehow make it unsuitable for any other buisness? Most video store setups are just shells over the square footage so once it was torn down it was easy to replace Two of my last stores became pharmacies. It really depends on square footage (my stores ranged from 3000 sqft to a 10000 sqft monstrosity I had to run for years)
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Aug 31, 2021 21:17
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