[JeremyMorgan]

This brings back some nostalgia for sure!

I was a BB customer and worked for Hollywood Video for quite a while, just as Netflix started taking over. It was sad.

There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals. Looking back and seeing Netflix and the other streaming options sprouting up, and the "cut the cord" movement.. it was neat. Until you look at where we are now. We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.

We all got swindled, and it's too late to do anything about it now.

[ikurei]

> There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals.

Please do say it! I'm old enough to remember VHS and video clubs, but may be not old enough to have a lot of nostalgia about it.

I can't think of what was better then. Sometimes you'd get a kind and knowledgeable video club owner who'd made fantastic recommendations, but more often than not it was an underpayed kid who just wanted to go home.

May be people used to take watching a move more seriously, and therefore enjoy it more, when the process was more involved and you didn't have millions of movies and shows a few clicks away, but does that count as an advantage?

> We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.

This was certainly not true where I lived. The ammount of movies and shows that get watched in an average household these days would bankrupt the family in the 90s.

[BrenBarn]

What I found better about it was the algorithm-free browsing experience. You would just look at the shelves and decide what to watch. The movies were broken down into basic genres, and sometimes there would be "staff picks" or something, but beyond that it was just you and the movies. This meant sometimes you watched really bad stuff, or good stuff, or stuff you wouldn't normally watch, or whatever.

No doubt there's a certain amount of nostalgia baked into these impressions. But definitely the thing I remember most fondly about that era was how decisions about things (movies, music, cereals, blenders, etc.) were made by looking at what was available and (maybe) doing a bit of research with external sources (like a "movie guide" book or whatever), rather than constantly wading through a morass of "recommendations", fake reviews, broken search functionality, and so on.

[tourmalinetaco]

The only thing we can do, as consumers, is stop paying for streaming, pay/rent physical media, and if we truly “need” on-demand streaming then piracy is always a moral option to abusive multi-billion dollar businesses. A $5/mo VPN is far more value than you can get out of streaming, especially if you invest the saved money into a Jellyfin server.

[ffgjgf1]

But overall isn’t it cheaper now than it was before?

e.g. if you don’t like monthly fees it’s still possible to “rent” movies on Apple TV, Amazon etc. for $5 (so cheaper than BB inflation adjusted).

Movies hardly make any money anymore outside of cinemas while DVD/VHS used to be a significant revenue source (up to 50%).