Would love to see something like that on the local high street. Hasnt been the same ever since the demise of blockbuster.

the last rental store in my city closed over a year ago. We still have a few of those self-serve DVD/BD kiosk machines around the city but those are reducing.

After reading this I think I'll go to the tip tomorrow and look at VHS

Pubic libraries still lend out DVD/BD at zero cost (you just need a membership card), at least here anyway. I don't even live in a major city.
The franchise rental stores, yeah most were gone ages ago (like most of the Video-Ezy stores), but the last local Blockbuster closed less than 5 years ago surprisingly. The last few months it was open I was going in there getting some discs resurfaced for less than $5 each, actually much less than that the couple times I went in there with a load of discs to be done.

The machine itself was already spoken for apparently, which was a little strange as myself and a few other people were going in there and getting loads of discs resurfaced...it must've done heaps of hours extra work from the time it had a deposit left on it.

Free rentals? That's pretty cool. The two public libraries that were local to me have closed too. One is now a mosque and the other has been converted into flats.

The local libraries don't have much tbh, but as they're all linked statewide you can request to have something moved from another branch. Also, there's a recommend/request system for books, DVD/BD anything that they would normally have but don't actually have in their catalogue. Years ago I nominated several classic Dr Who DVD releases (they already had a few but were missing a bunch, they still had a few left on VHS at that point iirc but a lot had been sold off). My recommendations were approved and they purchased them.

Our libraries (what's left) have a similar system here in Scotland. Most don't have much on the shelves but if it is in their catalogue it can be sent to whatever branch requests it, they also do add requested titles that they do not have.

No rental places left now as far as I know, most gone quite a while ago.

The library here has a massive selection and yeah it's all free. Of course there will be a wait on popular new movies.

For pay rentals there is redbox, but that's basically it in terms of things that are reasonably wide spread.

That's pretty much all we have in the states that I know of unless you are in a more populated area and there is a small video rental
store.

But with all this covid stuff the Libraries are opening very slowly and I doubt we can get much anymore until they open fully.
Also this may be a death blow to the physical media for covid, no new stuff coming out and all streaming since
they make more money.

I borrowed It's Garry Shandling's Show from my public library. (Ordered in from other branches) and ripped it all. Highly educational. Never aired here (Unlike Larry Sanders) but GSS basically was the prototype to Seinfeld. Very great. Very interesting. Now I want LSS it's expensive on DVD and the public library in my jurisdiction doesn't have it. Should I request it?

Was LSS released on R4 DVD?
I could be wrong but I don't think libraries will import, but maybe they might if there's a UK release that is R2/4 and no local release is available for purchase.

Oh LSS is def on local DVD. I guess I should restate. I only want to own the US DVD because of the Aus rating markings ruining the pacakaging. So I'd settle for a rip from the local library, just to see the show. There is a torrent available but the quality is woeful.

There's nothing left in my area to rent from except Red Box, and you can borrow for free from the libraries if you're a county resident and have a membership card, but the selection is limited and all of their discs are really scratched up.


Likewise, except our libraries are open, but limiting the number of people who can come in and requiring masks and gloves.

Here in the U.S.A., the major corporate rental chains killed the market for independent rental stores to the point that most independents were out of business by the mid-90's. But even then, the corporate rental stores had so flooded the markets with themselves that they often struggled in select markets due to over saturation of rental store options for the consumers. We had:

• Blockbuster Video (The first and the last of it's kind.)
• Movie Gallery (the suckiest of all video rental chains in human history)
• Mooovies (had a cow mascot)
• Video Update (They bought out Moovies.)
• Hollywood Video (Believe they bought out Video Update if remember correctly.)
• Pic-A-Flick (This one had both corporate stores and franchised locations.)

Pic-A-Flick was unique in that it didn't contribute to the fall of the independent video rental stores. It was a situation where the independents bought in as a franchise and got all the bulk purchasing perks as the big corporate chains and gained for themselves the power of branding and marketing. Even after the corporate went out of business twenty or so years ago, the franchisers owned the rights to continue operating using the name, as all of them had shared ownership in the name usage rights. The last Pic-A-Flick Video in my area was in a neighboring county about 25 miles away and they shut down in 2018. That was the very last video rental store remotely close to where I live at, and I never even visited that location.

The irony to me was that NetFlix directly was responsible for putting these chains out of business by offering unbelievably cheap video rental by mail. And then what did NetFlix do when they conquered their competition? They got out of the business too! Like, okay all you extinct competitors we screwed you all! And then they proceeded to give the bird hand gesture to their customers as they abandoned them without remorse.

I have a terrific public library, and at some point they finally got into the bluray game. But their DVD selection is not what it was 8 years ago when I moved here. Used to be you could get anything Criterion, for instance - even OOP stuff like Armageddon. A lot of things I used to regularly check out are no longer in the catalog, unless I want to order from the library share program. (which admittedly is a very good service). Even the share service has fewer things than it used to have. It used to be easy to get the quality releases of the Warner Oland Charlie Chan films, but not anymore.

I think what's happening is that they don't replace discs when they get too scratched or get stolen or whatever. They definitely push streaming video, like Hoopla. Hoopla's site is free to library card holders, but the selection is very small and has a monthly limit of 7 digital checkouts - including movies, comics, music, ebooks, audiobooks, and TV episodes. Used to be 10, but they lowered it.

There is a chain around here called Family Video. I don’t know how many locations they have but it’s at least three because I think the Midland. Saginaw, and Bay City locations are still going. I think they probably have at least a dozen.

I used to work in video rental in the 90s and I agree that even in the Boockbuster days the corporate stores were constantly eating each other’s lunch. I used to work in a Video Watch (later bought by Hollywood Video) which was major in Michigan and not much elsewhere. In some towns the Blockbuster had all the market, in other towns Video Watch did, but they always put both in any real market, no matter how many popular stores already existed with decades of customer history. This lead to a rather large number of Blockbusters with extremely low business.

I also lived in a town where we had one office supply store the size of a garage and then both Office Max and Staples build massive flagship stores right access the street from each other the same year.

Yeah Family Video is pretty much the last rental chain. They are everywhere. They had to shutter a couple locations around here but they honestly had too many.

Topeka had what was probably one of the last totally local rental shops on the north end of town. Duncan's Movie Magic. I was trying to find the date they closed but nothing conclusive. They outlasted every Blockbuster though, it was rather impressive. The owner was old, so while I'm sure business was down it was also in part simply retirement. I went to his garage sale about 4 years ago. The amount of awesome stuff he still had was impressive. Prices were blowout too, so I bought some stuff.

Before I moved to a bigger city in 2012, my smallish city had one video/book/music store left: Hastings. It was a big one and had a decent rental selection. Plus, if you turned your movies in early, you could earn credits towards a future rental.

I suspect they're gone. Where I live now, we had a Blockbuster for a few years. I was heavily active in Letterboxd in 2012-13, and Blockbuster + the public library helped me source material for movie reviews. Much as I hated Blockbuster for killing all the other shops, I hated even more seeing them die off.

I think there is still a demand for video and even video game rental, but the initial cost to launch into that kind of business is kinda up there, and there is risk.

Libraries do not "replace" broken, damaged, lost, or stolen media at all. If you are not aware of the operating model, it is that the state and/or county and/or smaller municipality basically flips the bill for operational expenses and salaries and the content of the library is then acquired via direct donation or using funds from financial contributors who sponsor the library either independently or through a organization. In my state, the library employees are state government employees, so the state flips the bill for their salaries and the computer system (statewide inventory network) and the county/city/town provides the building and covers the maintenance of the buildings, or so it was explained to me many years ago. Speaking again only for my state, library usage and membership plummeted in the late 90's when the library system announced a series of not well regarded changes. First was that they were expanding their Discard policies on all media and books donated into the system as they were completely eliminating their book repair and binding center, which was centrally located in the middle of the state. Secondly they announced they would no longer accept book donations of books unless they were absolutely brand new. Thirdly, book titles donated to the library which were determined to be brand new books that did not have prior presence within the system would be subjected to a board review before being accepted into the library system.

So under these new policies, there was a almost overnight massive book purge from the libraries statewide as the initial phase of implementation had all libraries removing any book from the shelves that was over five years old, with only a handful of category exemptions made, notably for 'How-To' and 'Arts & Crafts'. They further purged all of the books which had been repaired or rebound by their then closed binding and repair center. And the policy has continued down that destructive path and now is that they don't keep any media past three years. Hits three years, and it gets stamp marked "DISCARDED". The thing which is so utterly disgusting about this is that since these policies were put into place, all of the libraries have been moved into much larger buildings, with less content to offer than ever before. My own local library, which when I was a kid was only a mile from the house use to have so many books that they didn't have enough shelving, nor enough room for any additional shelving so there were actually large stacks of books all over the place. So if you liked books, it was like a book heaven with books just everywhere and something for everyone. Now if I got into the new location of my local library, which is now one block closer than the old location, there are empty shelves, and there are retail-store style displays with sometimes twenty or more copies of the exact same book, and the selection is just abysmal. You're average thrift store has a better book selection than my ridiculously huge library, with it's vast open floor spaces and enough chairs to make you wonder if it's not actually a hospital lobby area. And at my library, the movies selection is mostly just one or two small shelves of very recent movie releases, mostly on Blu-Ray but some DVDs, and the odd single disc of a random TV series. The people who staff the libraries now, whom I don't consider to be librarians, tend to be well dressed rude people who get highly offended if you dare to ask them anything, and nearly all questions you might ask them will result in them pointing to a public use computer and telling you to go look it up because they don't know.

Essentially the libraries have gone from being a great place that we as a society took great pride in where everyone freely had access to the vast collective wealth of knowledge of all mankind, to becoming this pale and pathetic shadow of what it was meant to be and use to be and may never be again. And our main county library is the worst case example I can give. When I was a child, that was the largest library in this entire part of the state, it was a three story building with like a one full acres foot-print, prominently sitting on a corner lot in the city. Bottom/basement floor was non-book media, I mean it was a massive selection of audio and video of all sorts, they even still had 8mm film reels you could checkout if you were into that sort of thing. second/ground floor was your general library selection but crazy huge, and the third floor was unique, it was the reference hall and had a massive lit globe that spun featured dead center, and that was shelf after shelf of government records and books, legal books, anything of that nature they had it there, and because you had political and legal type professionals using the reference hall entry was actually restricted to no one under the age of 12.

I bring that location up because, they closed it shortly after those crazy operational policies went into effect. They closed it and they moved it into a new three-story building less than half the size footprint of the old building a block away from the old building in a much harder to access location all around, But, instead of being three stories of books and media, the bottom/ground floor is a combination of rentable conference rooms and a city government owned coffee shop (why?), only the second floor has books & media, third floor is some manner of county and/or city offices.

So this is not solely a decline of rental stores, it's a decline much bigger in scope than that of just one business type. We're just mostly seeing this as a decline of the one business type because that's what this community we're a part of here is focused on, but it really is a bigger picture than that.

Hastings folded as a company a few years back. When the Topeka location closed they dug out everything it was insane. There were even Atari carts. I bought some ps1 and Dreamcast games.

Does anybody know where to find high quality scans of the cover and disc art for the True Lies bootleg BD?

There are libraries that still have 16mm film print collections. Sadly none local to me, as it would be crazy to check out an actual film (I have 3 16mm projectors). Maybe an interlibrary loan could yield some classic feature to screen. Lots of these collections were sold off over the years.

The decline of libraries is a sad thing. There should be nothing discarded unless absolutely necessary. Lot's of city libraries also serve as de facto homeless shelters these days.

At least I still have a university library local that keeps everything - other than some old academic journals and periodicals they did discard. Nicely, these were offered to the community for free before going into the dumpster with a list to choose from: I got a full bound set of 1980s PC Magazines, bound Apple II mag "InCider", old hifi mags from the tube era, and some other treasures like many 1930s-40 bound issues of the pictorial oversize "Asia" magazine (real Indiana Jones era stuff) and probably the most significant set, 1960s-70s issues of the mainframe era computer magazine Datamation. At least we can preserve as much as possible in our private libraries.