Josh-da-man

Yeah, that's when they hit the scene. Blockbuster was able to make its fortune and run all of the independent shops out of business because they cut a deal with the studios.

Essentially, the original model for VHS was that the cassettes would cost in the neighborhood of $100 each (and god help you if you lost a rental and had to replace it!) and the stores would have to rent it out dozens of times to make their investment in it back.

Then Blockbuster comes around and cuts a deal with the studios where they buy the VHS cassettes for a pittance, share the rental revenue with the studios, and then they got to sell the tape once the interest in the movie was trailed off.

So back in 1994, Mom-n-Pop's video store might have one or two copies each of Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, but the nearest Blockbuster would have an entire wall of thirty, forty, of fifty copies those VHS cassettes waiting to be rented out.

That's true. There were the occasional exception, where a movie was released to VHS "priced to own," but, for the most part, there was a rental window for about six months or a year before the price came down.

DVD, like laserdisc before it, was intended as a consumer format and priced to own. I do remember some studios, like Fox, trying to goose the price of new releases up into the $40 range (whereas Columbia, Warner, and Universal were priced in the $20-$30 range) to try to recapture the old rental window.

TomOpus

I'll still rent from the library. Sometimes I won't have a certain streaming service. Rental is free, 21 day window, no late fees, you can reserve and extend rentals right on the website. Only thing is they only deal with DVDs. Another library system carries blu-rays but the location near me closed down permanently recently.

bluetoast

Forgot about the library. A few years ago I lived across the street from a library and could get movies delivered there if they weren’t available at that moment.

DJariya

My local Mom and Pop store before it shut down violated street dates all the time. He would get his new movies Thursday and put them out right away even though they weren't suppose to come out on Tuesday. I'm sure most small stores did the same. Once you get them in, you gotta make your money ASAP.

bluetoast

Yeah, this one store in my college town would rent bootlegs of the Star Wars holiday special and probably other things that weren’t actual releases.

fujishig

The local Japanese book store had an entire video section of programs taped off of Japanese TV. It's how I originally watched (unsubbed) Dragon Ball Z.

rbrown498

Does anyone in the Washington, D.C. area remember Video Vault? That was my all-time favorite video store, as they had a LOT of "convention copies" of movies not legally available on VHS. They started in Old Town Alexandria and then opened another store somewhere in the D.C. metro area, but I never went to the other location.

When I lived in that area from 1988-1990, there were a lot of great video stores. Every other weekend or so I'd go into Maryland looking for video stores with previously-viewed tapes to buy. I got my first copy of Bava's Blood and Black Lace from one store in Silver Spring, IIRC. There was also a Tower Records near the Foggy Bottom metro stop that had one of the best sources for used VHS tapes; I remember buying a used copy of Letter to Breshnev there, and I still don't think that it's been released on disc here in the States yet. Even Erol's Video had stuff that I'd never seen before; the first time that I saw Fulci's The Beyond was on a tape I rented from Erol's (under the 7 Doors of Death title).

Good times.