In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

I might be the only one who cares about these, but mentioning it here just in case. As you might know, many video and electronics stores had in-store programs of movie trailers, music videos and sometimes commercials played on repeat. The first of these were on VHS tapes and laserdiscs, then they moved to DVD by the year 2000. Nowadays of course such things are distributed by internet and don't seem to be as common as they used to be.

I've been collecting these for a long time, having saved several laserdiscs from being thrown out at stores. I've gotten back into them recently as two discs from Blockbuster showed up on Ebay and I bought them, actually having to outbid someone else on them, and then finding someone on Facebook who worked for Hollywood Video and sold me a whole box of in-store discs from there. Surprisingly a lot of other people want copies of them, and I've found that you can upload iso images of the complete discs onto Archive.org which will give you an exact unaltered copy of the original disc. Not only that, but a few others have been uploading similar discs. A real find has been about 15 discs from Movie Gallery (which we never had in my area). You can find them here:

https://archive.org/details/@mgtv

Most of these are viewable online in low quality, but downloading the iso image and then burning it to a blank DVD or playing on a computer software player will give you the same thing as the original disc. (Note that none of the discs I've check have had CSS encryption, so we're not talking about any type of piracy here if that's a concern to the mods. These were made in very limited quantities only for stores, and most were thrown out after they'd been played for the month. Naturally I feel they should all be preserved, thankfully others have felt the same way.)

Search for "instore DVD" will find a few others as well; I've uploaded the 2 Blockbuster discs I've got and will be uploading the Hollywood Video ones in the next few days, I'll also be uploading some early DVD demo discs which haven't been seen since the format was new. Would love it if anyone else here who has these discs would upload them as well (or you can send them to me if you just want to get rid of them.)

Here's part of a Montgomery Ward instore laserdisc, this is just hilarious. I need to redo this in better quality but this is the sort of thing I love:


And from Circuit City, long version of "Welcome to Circuit City" in laserdisc quality:

Re: In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

I remember the Videotapes we'd play on loop at RadioShack.

Re: In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

I have a few of those, because my friend's stepmom (who knew nothing about electronics) worked there. Their house had a fire but it was rebuilt, a couple days after the fire I got to go in and take whatever I wanted. All the VHS tapes in there had survived the fire. It was a HUGE fail of Radio Shack to do all these tapes in mono, even the music videos- proof they didn't know what the hell they were doing. They used T-160 tapes so they could be as long as possible at least.

Here's the best (or worst) bits off one of them, I need to redo this in better quality also:

Re: In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

A fun whiff of nostalgia. Do any stores play videos anymore? Target and even Walmart don't have anything like them for any product, much less movies. Seems like the days of stores having functioning displays are over. I guess Costco will have demo loops for some of their higher end TVs.

Re: In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

We had some that were in stereo and were various clips to highlight 4head VHS stereo. Using all store stock for all cables and connections we had it running on our top TV and a Stereo component system. Don't remember if there anything other than some instrumental music. For this particular demo tape I remember nature scenes and some other outdoors type stuff.

Re: In-store trailer loop DVDs
 

I have a Dolby Surround demo tape from Radio Shack, need to put that on YouTube though I don’t remember it being too impressive.

Gonna start a Facebook group dedicated to these. I posted about the Hollywood Video discs in one group and got tons of requests for copies.