MINDLESS MUSINGS

Glory Days of Home Video #2

I remember hearing at least two separate stories about people getting ripped off by the inaugural video shops. Looking back, it was a shonky business model, but everyone was learning on the run. Those first video shops charged a subscription fee, I believe it was for a year. Once you paid, it was literally a video library. You could swap as many times as you liked. There would have been a limit of say only 2 cassettes at a time, but it seemed like a good deal according to the grownups.

Trouble was this turned out to be an unsustainable way to do business and most shops closed pretty quickly. Like I said, I can recall at least two separate adults recounting how they pulled up to their video store and it was shut down. They got to keep whatever tapes they happened to be returning, but they lost the subscription payment. So now we all knew a few people who actually owned a video copy of a proper movie – cool.

I have no memory of ever visiting one of these original stores, so I have no clue regarding the selection of movies they had. Judging from my first recollections of going to the (new version) video stores I can assume it was a combination of sparse yet diverse. The industry was in its’ infancy, so it would take a long time to get the bulk of films onto the tapes.

I do remember a specific commercial taking the piss out of the old style of video rental shops. It showed a cartoon of the shop disappearing with a pop. The new system would have the customer paying for each individual rental for a set period of time rather than a yearly subscription (late fees apply of course). I do not know the ???? of this, but it seemed to be successful for a very long time. Even into the DVD era.

I have no doubt the distributors were pushing them out as fast as they could. People were lapping this shit up! I wonder who was making the decision on which one to transfer onto tape next.

“Was this movie a hit in its day?”

“Will it hold up today?”

The whole thing was trial and error. Even the format was contested. Was your video Betamax or VHS? People would be more than willing to tell you the benefits of whatever it was they were using. Trouble was, this meant they were releasing films in two separate formats.

Funny thing I found was that the grown-ups usually disagreed on which format was superior in quality, and which one was going to be there in the long run. Us kids were only interested in what movies were available in the format we had access to.

So, the distributers are somehow deciding which of the movies they have rights to they should release next. I have no evidence of this, but it seemed to me that they weren’t simply making a Beta and VHS version of each title. I remember running up to my dad with a movie I really wanted to watch. He would take one look at it and say those dreaded words “Beta” – Fuck! We were team VHS.

I would scour the VHS section to no avail. The grass was always greener on the Beta side of the shop. It was great to have a mate whose dad was a Beta owner! A miniature version of changing your VPN to US for Netflix.

If you remember when DVDs were starting out, you have an idea of what I’m describing. I am laughing right now because I know there are young people saying, “what’s DVD?” or maybe a little less young saying “DVDs? Those old things”. Well, I was an adult when they were the new fandangled shit.

The comparison I am making is that DVDs didn’t come to the market with a comprehensive film selection. I imagine it was large (I was late to the DVD party), but it took years to get anywhere near the sweeping catalogue that video had built up. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure they ever really got that far. I reckon internet streaming took off before the DVD market managed to transfer as many titles as VHS had.

I can still recall a bloke working at my local Blockbuster store giving me his prediction of the next phase of movie rental after DVD. He described a much smaller store with digital screens displaying the available titles. No more physical discs and cases on shelves, just these screens. People could scroll through the menu at home if they liked.

Instead of renting a DVD the customer would give the person behind the counter a USB and their selection would be uploaded from the stores database. Some hypothetical software would erase the film after a set period. He was on the right track, but I hope he didn’t invest in this scheme.

Back to my childhood video format dilemma, in the end VHS was victorious and Beta was relegated to technological history.  

One final tale before I move on. Many years later one of my mates whose father was team Beta gave him his old player and a box full of tapes. There were quite a few hard-to-find titles in there and the player still worked! That was cool. I have no idea where those fossils are now though.