“In Search of the Last Great Video Store”

A great read from Kate Hagen of the Black List.

Kate Hagen (@thathagengrrl) is the Director of Community at @theblcklst. She also knows — and cares — as much about movies as anyone I know. She wrote a fantastic and EXTENSIVE article for the Black List blog: In Search of the Last Great Video Store. Here is an excerpt:

We all like to assume that the movies and television shows we love will be available with a click whenever we want them — one can now buy an Amazon button for Doritos, after all — but the stability of what media is available online (and how long it stays there) is quite tenuous. “You are not in control of what you have access to — you are picking from a small library that’s always rotating,” says Maggie Mackay, Board Chair and Executive Director of Vidiots.

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Since 2010, the total number of feature films available to stream on Netflix has dropped from 6,755 to 3,686 as of writing this — a loss of more than three thousand titles. There are far more television shows available on Netflix than in 2010 — up from 530 to 1,122 — but that doesn’t make up for the massive decline in streamable films.

And, as BGR notes, “Not only is Netflix primarily focused on generating original TV content, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos a few years ago said that 66% of all Netflix subscribers don’t even watch movies.”

In 2018, over 375 million people subscribe to Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Streaming has become the dominant way in which most of us consume media, but little consideration has been given to what we’ve lost in saying goodbye to the tactile, human experience of visiting a video store.

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The volatile nature of streaming catalogues becomes apparent when trying to look into hard numbers on just how many titles are available. One has to use third-party sites like JustWatch to find out how many movies are currently available on major platforms (as well as other data, like release year, genre, and a search function that covers all major streaming services) rather than the platforms directly offering those numbers up.

Netflix’s current streaming catalogue of 3,686 films seems paltry when compared to even the most average Blockbuster, which stocked in the neighborhood of 10,000 titles. Amazon Prime’s streaming library is three times the size of Netflix’s, with 14,214 films now streaming — Amazon also offers an additional 20,265 titles via their rental service for an additional fee. Hulu has less than half as many movies as Netflix with 1,448 titles now streaming. On HBO NOW, that number falls to only 727 films.

When comparing these numbers to the libraries of three essential video stores — Los Angeles’ own Vidiots and Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee and Scarecrow Video in Seattle — the lack of what’s available on streaming falls into sharp relief. Vidiots boasts a collection of over 50,000 titles; Eddie Brandt’s carries over a hundred thousand videos, 80,000 of them on VHS.

In Seattle, Scarecrow’s video collection of over 131,000 is the largest in the world — they carry more than twice as many titles as the 57,351 movies and television shows currently available on the 44 streaming and rental platforms that JustWatch tracks.

With such a deep catalogue, it’s no surprise that Scarecrow’s library contains some exceptionally rare titles. The Daily Mail reports that “Scarecrow boasts 4,967 titles on their Rental By Approval (RBA) list…that can be checked out with an extra deposit. Of their top 100 rarest titles, which they are cross-checking against esteemed institutions including the Library of Congress, UCLA’s Film and Television Archive and the WorldCat database among others, 88 are not held by the Library of Congress and 44 are not accessible to the public anywhere but at Scarecrow.”

If you love movies, you have to read this article. With streaming services, we gained a lot, but also lost a lot. We need video stores. And many still exist. In fact, what Kate and the folks at the Black List are proposing is this:

As Kate says in the article:

It’s impossible not to get dismayed by the current state of the video rental industry — the big picture is grim, and a national comeback would be a near-miracle. But record stores and independent bookstores were once declared dead too — and they’ve staged marvelous comebacks. I have to believe that video stores can do the same.

My father-in-law owned three video stores back when it was the front edge of the technology, but he got crushed by the emergence of Blockbuster. Now Blockbuster is no more, but could we see a renaissance of independent video stores? In Chicago, a favorite is Odd Obsession.

How about you? Any video stores in your neighborhood? Let Kate know as they strive to create a map of all the video stores in North America.

For the rest of the article, go here.