Lutz

I was going to comment about the days of VCR where everything would go to rental first and then you would get the retail copy seven months later - if at all (but everyone already beat me to it).

I remember a lady telling me the process in store when I was ten.

Pizza

This isn't going to work. Renters are renters and buyers are buyers. Sure, us collectors have unwatched DVDs falling off of shelves, but I doubt most renters have piles of DVDs waiting to be watched except those that came in the mail from Netflix. I hardly believe that renters will be so rabid to see a title that they'll buy it instead of waiting a few weeks later to rent it. Heck, I got the collector gene in me and I can easily wait weeks if not months to buy a must-have title for a better price. I suspect that this is more about Redbox than anything else. Netflix didn't sound too shook up by it.

orangerunner

There must be a rental agreement license on top of the $8-$12 disc price.

Otherwise the rental stores would be making a fortune!

If you rent a disc three times for $5 per rental, you've already made your money back and the rest is pure profit?

Sounds a little too simple & easy. I'm sure there is a higher price involved per disc or a license agreement that takes a certain percentage when renting films.

MEJHarrison

I don't have any problem with this. If I want something really bad, I'm going to purchase it. If it's not good enough to purchase, but good enough to rent, I don't mind waiting a little longer to see it. It's not like Netflix only rents new releases. I could quit my job today and spend years enjoying the Netflix library of titles. So what if I have to wait a couple more weeks to see the latest crappy movie (because if it was a good movie, I would have purchased it).

I really don't understand the compulsion to see the latest releases RIGHT NOW! They're not going anywhere.

brayzie

I guess this could work..
The people I know, despite having to count their pennies, rent/buy the latest movies on impulse.

So if they want to see that really good looking movie on DVD that they missed in theaters, they probably will buy it if they can't find it to rent.

Wouldn't this kind of work out like hardcovers? Most people know that Stephen King's new book will be out later in paperback and cheaper, but a substantial amount of people still want to buy it now. Then again with video's you got torrents...

I don't think I'll be supporting Redbox or Blockbuster. If Redbox takes out the traditional video rental, I'll only be able to rent new movies.
I very much enjoy browsing the various sections for older or less well known movies. I don't think I'd have evern seen The Believer if Redbox was the only place to rent.
And Blockbuster...they really hurt the mom n pop video store so nothing for them either.

UAIOE

You book analogy doesn't work. People can borrow a book from the library instead of buying it.

This is more akin to the book publisher saying that the library can't lend out books because they wanna make book sales first.

Cheato

Libraries don't have hundreds of copies of a single book.
And they often don't have the newest books right away.
And if they do, those are checked out pretty quickly, and hard to get any time soon.

So although people may borrow books from the library, they can't borrow whatever they want whenever they want--especially "new releases."

neilo13

I know someone who owned a mom n' pop video rental store. He would go to Sam's club on Tuesday morning and buy the new releases. There is no law (at least in PA) stopping any rental place from doing the same thing.

Unless the studios can bully in some legislation regarding this or alter their distribution to stop selling thousand or hundreds of thousands of copies to the Blockbusters and Netflixes of the rental market, the most damage they could do to rental outfits would be to delay their ability to have the new releases on release day, the rental outlets would have to wait until release day to get their copies and I am sure that most renters would be more than willing to wait a few days to rent the newest release.

In fact, if this would happen it could benefit the mom n' pop shops, as I suspect most of them do what my friend did and buy the new releases Tuesday morning, meaning they could possibly have the newest titles available before the Blockbusters etc., due to the comparatively small volume they deal in.

JCWBobC

That's what made rental stores so popular back in the 80's-90's. With the sell-through, kids tapes and older tapes, which were usually $14.95-$29.95, you would rent it 3-4 times and the rest was profit. The full price new releases would take longer to make their money back but for the first 2-3 weeks ever copy would be out for rent almost every day. Then you get to add on the late fees and you made your money back pretty quick.

Somewhere in the mid 90's, I don't remember the year, a company started called Rentrak that would sell the new releases at a discounted price, I believe it was around $35-$40, but they would get a percentage of each rental. We would buy 50-70 copies of the biggest new release, it would rent for 2-3 weeks straight, and then we would return 30-50 copies for credit and sell the rest as used, uually for $9.95. We would keep 2-3 copies as catalog titles but it was the only way to compete with Blockbuster.

They problem became that store were popping up everywhere and each one would lower the price to get more customers in the store. I remember back in the 80's my store used to charge $2.99 for a new release so I was shocked when I called a local Blockbuster and found out they were charging $4.99 for every tape in the store. Also back in the 80's stores charged between $50-$75 for a lifetime membership but by the 90's memberships were free because their was so much competition.

I remember when the first video store I worked in closed down. I had started their right after I graduated high school in 86 and was there for almost 4 years. I was pretty upset when a customer called to complain because they had bought a lifetime membership. I had to explain to them it was the lifetime of the store and not their lifetime.

Bob

JCWBobC

As for buying tapes from another store and renting them. In the early 90's I managed a video rental store in my town and a video sell-through store in a big mall at the same time. Whenever a new Disney movie would come out the sell-through store would sell it for $14.95 to compete with the Sam Goody that was about 5 store down from us. The distributor price was around $17.95 so I would buy a few copies for the rental store to sell for $19.95 and a few to put out for rental. People would pay the $19.95 so they didn't have to go to the mall and have to deal with the people & the parking. This was all before the internet got so big so no one was doing their shopping or comparing prices on-line like they do now.

Bob