I get it, today's AI is pretty good, meh, not really, but it would be hard to beat my old "Dave". Maybe someday.
With Netflix or whatever Streaming Service you have you have an immense catalogue coupled with ease of access to get ratings/critiques/etc. There is so many things to choose from and it's so easy to just say "no" to a suggestion, and likely that thing you said "no" to will still be there tomorrow. Why not just keep browsing?
With the video store of old it's so much more purposeful. You pick up a movie, and you feel incentivized to watch it because you literally just paid for it. You paid for that one Movie, not access to the entire store (which you also need to physically go to, and then come all the way back home with a tape or dvd). Also the ubiquity of movie/tv reviews was not as present so you don't necessarily feel like you're making a bad choice.
I got curious, so let's look it up.
Googling, it looks like maybe Netflix has 17,000 titles total in in it's collection internationally in april 2022, but only a portion of those are available in a given market. One page from 2021 said the US catalog was ~5K titles, but I bet it's bigger in 2022 as the overall catalog has grown as much as 30% maybe. So I dunno, let's say somewhere between 5K and 8K titles available in USA market netflix?
How many titles did a typical Blockbuster carry? From 1988: "Blockbuster, for instance, operates superstores that stock roughly 10,000 tapes (about 6,500 different titles), compared to the 1,500 to 2,500 a typical independent offers." —https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/01/business/a-tight-squeeze-...
(Blockbuster didn't have much/any TV, while that's potentially a big part of Netflix though?)
So it's the same ballpark anyway. Netflix doesn't actually have a whole lot more titles than a Blockbuster did.
It’s still going to be a while before a recommendation engine takes in to account the kind of day you’ve had, whether anyone else is going to join you, how you and your spouse are doing today, how you want to start the night, how you want to end the night, and so-on. A good staff member can answer all those questions just by looking you in the eyes.
Going to the video store was organic and analog. Like going to your barista that still insists on using the hand pump espresso machine. Perhaps the human touch still is the best?
It's pretty good at suggesting exactly the same type of movies you've watched before, but not so good at those "but how about something completely different, but something that I'll still like" suggestions, that's where a real human movie buff can help.
Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite.
You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you.
Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard.
Kids movies are just for kids? Spirited Away!
You can't connect with female protagonists? You've got to see The Invisible Man.
Don't find food interesting? Try Tampopo.
Sick of movies which try to make a statement and fall flat? Promising Young Woman.
Most dramas feel too contrived? Marriage Story.
Musicals and plays aren't really your thing? Hamilton.
Additionally, studies have found that (when A/B testing recommender system vs no recommender system) users create their own, more localized "echo chambers" in absence of a recommender. This is measured by the "diversity" of content consumed, which decreases if a user is their own recommender.
Movie and music recommendation engines seem to work like this. Human tastes are much more complex and multi-dimensional than "This person prefers genre X" but AI systems don't even come close to grasping the subtlety.
Blockbuster always had the least interesting inventory of the rental places in our neighborhood and their employees tended to be less knowledgeable, but because they were the only place that was guaranteed to have the latest box office hits, they drove the other stores out of business. Their homogenization and crapification of the video rental industry is what created the opportunity for Netflix's rise -- NFLX's original DVD-by-mail catalog was vast and movie buffs could finally get their hands on the obscure classics they were no longer able to find locally.
We're making a better world for consumers, but sometimes I wonder if it's a better world for people.
Have you actually on multiple occasions wondered about this? Or has your brain just been colonized by pithy statements?
I would agree. You have to see it at least once to appreciate it :)
"You borrowed this a couple of months ago." "Oh yeah. Whoops. I remember now."
Meanwhile a priority row on streaming sites is WATCH IT AGAIN. And I do because the selection is so poor that I'd rather re-watch bits of favourite films over and over.
I've visited a TON of taste-making sites and some used to be OK at suggesting what to watch, but it's been tough to find good ones lately, and I'd pay good money for somebody to sort through all of the cruft for me.
You've got your "decider" and other sites, but something more personal, or at least human curated in terms of "here is the canon of this genre" or "if you liked this you'll 1000% like this other thing"
Blockbuster, though, no.
If you wanted to pay old Blockbuster prices (adjusted for inflation) for x5 good, and personalised, Netflix recommendations a month, I'm sure what you have left after the subscription itself would find a bunch of movie buffs online happy to earn $20-50/month (I'm too lazy to figure out what a typical old monthly cost was, or would be after inflation) by learning what you've liked in the past and thinking of recommendations based on whichever platform you're subscribed to.
And equally, some shops still exist selling films physically, though relatively few because most people don't want to pay more.
Hey, maybe there's a startup idea there - connecting subscribers with paid individual recommenders. But I'll stick to not paying extra for members of staff I never asked recommendations of, personally.
I started converting / collecting most of my movie collection onto a localized server years ago, and glad I did. Though I rarely watch all my old movies (a growing list of about 1000 including most of my favorite TV shows), the end game I think we all know is everything streamed, with no actual ownership of content. It's not a terrible notion, but the problem I think we've all seen is it's now turned into a corporate ownership game, and you never know where the content you're interested in watching is. One day Star Trek is on Netflix, the next Paramount, etc.
The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes, even though I'm a firm believer in unless you're watching on something well over 100" a nice high-quality 1080P file looks just great on a large 85" tv (which I currently have).
Also got a hi-fi beta player recently and even though Beta is only 10 more lines than VHS at 250 (compared to 420 for LD and SVHS) it really did not look that bad on an LCD. It's also possible that the unit I received and the tape I tried it with have less wear than the average VHS VCR.
The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many thanks to the talented fans for putting the de-specialized versions together.
I'm wondering with the resurgence in popularity of the LP, and with media stores re-configuring their store fixtures to sell them, if we'll get Bluray films being distributed in the large 12" size with large photos and booklets.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...
We're either moments before or moments after direct competition between UHD televisions and AI-aided upscaling and artificial sharpness, where details that never existed in the original are being precisely rendered by screens with higher resolutions than the human eye.
I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.
Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.
I think the "what we've become accustomed to" is the most important factor there. Back in the VHS/NTSC days, without experience of anything else, I had not complaints about the quality.
- Tapes would get chewed by the player
- Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding)
- Tapes would degrade the more you used them
- sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware
- audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock
- if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording
- and even just getting the same content recorded was a game of chance. If the TV network was early or late airing your show or movie, there was a good chance you’ll end up missing some of it (back then there wasn’t an EPG so you had to programmed the VCR to start at a specific time rather than the start of a specific show).
Not to mention my younger brother kept jamming Lego into the VCR (but at least that’s not the fault of the technology).
I hated VHS. Switched to DVD the moment I could. Even though my computer wasn’t powerful enough to playback DVD properly I still massively preferred it.
and now we have 4k and ATMOS
I don’t think anyone has forgotten how crappy VHS was/is.
At least with vinyl, the sound quality was good even if the medium was bulky. But VHS just sucked in every way imaginable. Even in the 80s I hated VHS. It was the best we had but it always felt like a game of chance whether your recordings worked. I don’t miss a single thing about recording and playing video back then.
> The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes
A lot of the time content is just upscaled rather than remastered anyway. Particularly with TV shows but plenty of “HD” movies were just upscaled from DVDs rather than remastered from the original film rolls.
Just coincidentally, today I came across the the wikipedia entry for the last Laserdisc release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders in September 2001.
Sites like Pandora where you can't choose your playlist do come under mandatory licenses. But services where you can play any music on demand is individually negotiated with the rights holders. The reason competition is ubiquitous is that the music labels didn't want to be beholden to one company during the streaming era like they were with Apple during the iTunes era. Besides, they make all of the money from streaming (70%+) and leave the services with a pittance. It's a horrible business to be in as a standalone service.
It only makes sense as an integrated offering. Spotify and every other stand alone service is going to always be stuck with the "Dropbox problem". A streaming service is a feature not a product.
There are also government mandated max royalties for songwriters.
When I was a part time fitness instructor, the only way you could get music from the original artist was by knowing some DJs who did it low-key who could mix music on the 32 count phrase with a consistent beats per minute (step/cardio kickboxing etc.). The more mainstream fitness music had to use cover versions of the music. It's easier to get a license on the music, song writing than the entire performance.
You or the studio also had to have a separate performance license to play the music during class.
I can go on and on forever and I yada yada yada'd over the details on purpose.
The movie cost 99 cents to rent, which I thought was surprisingly cheap. The clerks were talking about how people come in to take pictures (no surprise there) and were usually inconsiderate about including the clerks in photos.
It smelled exactly the same in there. It was neat.
As in, rudely excluded the clerks, or rudely included? Either way makes sense me to me.
I think there's probably a lot of people who have that from their childhood.
It happened with record stores, too, via Tower Records and other national chains I can’t remember now
As it turns out, they did a really good job of insulating us as kids from the backup plans for broken VHS tapes, late fees, mis-boxed movies, returns that were accepted but never registered, out-of-stock hit movies, and other 'adult' problems. Their memories of movie nights did not have quite the same golden hue, but they were happy that they'd fostered that kind of memory in spite of the stresses of parenting.
TBH I'm a bit surprised no one has tried to buy the Blockbuster brand from Dish and restart the company. I feel like you could effectively run one much like a comic book store, there's always a niche that will patronize the business.
Best of both worlds?
I’m ok renting or buying digital movies from a big corp like Apple or Disney now that I don’t have to drive to a store.
Though the pipe to my house doesn’t need a big corp because we should have a free national municipal fiber network.
I actually liked our local Blockbuster, and have fond memories of it, but only because it was run by the same employees from the independent video store it drove out of business. I liked that one even better.
Is there a source for this? Usually, both rise and fall together with consumer demand. When I grew up, Blockbuster was one of a dozen options in town.
As an example, there are more independent coffee shops today than before Starbucks expanded.
It’s more discomforting than ironic.
But for me, it's not really about Blockbuster. It's about the format of home video. All the ritual, the excitement surrounding a new release that everyone wanted, sitting down to watch it together. It's about the object of video, the thing you can hold, and is similar to why I like to collect vinyl. I like the artifact in and of itself, along with what's encoded on it.
Wait? It was? I grew up through the 90s and have nothing but fond memories of Blockbuster
I distinctly remember 2 specific problems: 1) Being unable to get the latest release you wanted to watch. This was a big problem when video stores (not just Blockbuster) would only get in a few copies of new movies. Eventually Blockbuster got some sort of deal with the studios where they would get in something like 100 copies of the latest releases and the problem became #2:
2) Being unable to find anything but the most popular movies. If you wanted to watch that slightly less popular artsy film (but not anything as obscure as a foreign film, just not a (lowercase "b") blockbuster movie), they'd only have a few copies of it, and they'd inevitably all be rented out whenever you wanted to watch it.
I just remember going around the entire store and saying, "seen it, seen it, seen it, don't want to see it, seen it," etc.
[0] Well, if they had it and it was in stock.
I'm sure their parents who were responsible for rewinding the tapes, late fees, etc. remember the video stores less fondly.
Just getting to explore a new game for a little bit and then try something else next time was so much fun; you never knew what you were gonna get, just going off the box art. Even better was during the cartridge years, when you'd take a game home and it might already have a few different saves on it from other people, and you'd get to visit their characters and worlds, jump in at different points in the game, and try to imagine how it all fit together.
There was a gap of many years between Netflix killing Blockbuster, and game subscriptions becoming a thing where you could try them out casually again. Though of course even then, all the same physical nostalgia is missed; browsing the aisles, scrutinizing the boxes to try and figure out what it'll be like when you take it home, etc.
Hoping similar stores make a resurgence someday.
I wonder if you could combine them into some kind of "movie mishmash" where you could see new movies in the theater, rent older classics, or even buy new releases. Being able to stop in, grab a movie and hot popcorn, and drive home seems it could be a winner.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-really-killed-bloc...
It's amazing that Blockbuster had Netflix on the ropes, until one notorious activist investor showed up and basically gave Netflix the win.
One man is responsible for creating a completely different timeline when it comes to video streaming. Very similar to how we would be living in a different reality if GM's ahead-of-its-time EV1 was not mysteriously disappeared in the 90s.
In the 80s.
Couldn't he just virtualize? There is USB-Floppy devices, these days, to get even the last bit of compatibility right.
I think that physically going to _any_ special destination such as for tourism may be on a steep decline in the next few decades. VR glasses and goggles will be coming out that are very lightweight, comfortable, and convincing. We will also have eye tracking and eye contact in VR. There will be more advanced, faster more realistic 3d scanning of locations. There will also be the ability to "live scan", transmit and faithfully reproduce people moving around in an area. This will take advantage of advancements in graphics and AI.
Haptic glove technology will improve.
The conversation will be something like "remember when you had to actually _travel_ 5000 miles to see the Sistine Chapel or the last Blockbuster?"
Also, many times I witnessed exasperated parents and grandparents paying a huge late fee because their kids forgot to drop them off.
RIP RadioShack
