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November 7, 2013 01:33 am GMT
After years of clinging to life, Dish Network has announced it will pull the plug on its remaining 300 Blockbuster Video brick-and-mortar locations by early next year, signaling another death knell to the age of home video rental. The once-mighty video juggernaut had more than 9,000 locations at its peak in 2004, a number that significantly plummeted over the past decade. I worked for Blockbuster as a teenager in New Jersey in the late ’90s. The job had its ups and downs, and some parts that downright sucked, but it was a generally fun time in my life. With the advent of Redbox, a machine not much larger than an ATM performs a service that in my lifetime once took a building, a payroll, a management hierarchy, and two-dozen employees to deliver. Despite the distinct lack of “experience” involved in sauntering up to a machine and pressing a few buttons to make your selection and pay for it, the store model didn’t stand a chance. While most of us probably haven’t set foot inside a physical video store in a while, those of us of a certain age undoubtedly have a multitude of memories associated with the now almost quaint practice of going out to “rent a video.” When I was a kid, going to the video store was an event. Wed excitedly pile in the car and chatter the whole trip about which movie or game we wanted to rent. As part of the first generation with the technology to re-watch at home a movie we saw in the theater, we took full advantage of this brave new world of home entertainment. My parents grew up in a cinematic era littered with classics; the start of the James Bond film franchise, The Graduate, Planet of the Apes and countless others. Once they saw them in the theater, the only way to ever see them again was as a movie of the week on one of the handful of television channels available at the time. The roots of the on-demand home entertainment world we all now live in started with those robust black rectangles called VHS tapes. Everything about the video store was novel. The different membership cards, how they displayed the boxes and the security mechanisms on the tapes themselves were each unique, seemingly with an endless number of permutations. Ooh, this place cuts one side of the spine
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vnvRamAzSBg/
Blockbuster's Demise; An Elegy To Video Store Culture
After years of clinging to life, Dish Network has announced it will pull the plug on its remaining 300 Blockbuster Video brick-and-mortar locations by early next year, signaling another death knell to the age of home video rental. The once-mighty video juggernaut had more than 9,000 locations at its peak in 2004, a number that significantly plummeted over the past decade. I worked for Blockbuster as a teenager in New Jersey in the late ’90s. The job had its ups and downs, and some parts that downright sucked, but it was a generally fun time in my life. With the advent of Redbox, a machine not much larger than an ATM performs a service that in my lifetime once took a building, a payroll, a management hierarchy, and two-dozen employees to deliver. Despite the distinct lack of “experience” involved in sauntering up to a machine and pressing a few buttons to make your selection and pay for it, the store model didn’t stand a chance. While most of us probably haven’t set foot inside a physical video store in a while, those of us of a certain age undoubtedly have a multitude of memories associated with the now almost quaint practice of going out to “rent a video.” When I was a kid, going to the video store was an event. Wed excitedly pile in the car and chatter the whole trip about which movie or game we wanted to rent. As part of the first generation with the technology to re-watch at home a movie we saw in the theater, we took full advantage of this brave new world of home entertainment. My parents grew up in a cinematic era littered with classics; the start of the James Bond film franchise, The Graduate, Planet of the Apes and countless others. Once they saw them in the theater, the only way to ever see them again was as a movie of the week on one of the handful of television channels available at the time. The roots of the on-demand home entertainment world we all now live in started with those robust black rectangles called VHS tapes. Everything about the video store was novel. The different membership cards, how they displayed the boxes and the security mechanisms on the tapes themselves were each unique, seemingly with an endless number of permutations. Ooh, this place cuts one side of the spineOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vnvRamAzSBg/
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