Bad Day Entertainment Industry Part One: The Video Store

This is part of a three part series that I’m running today about the entertainment industry as a whole and how it relates to your home theater hardware.  Let’s just put it this way–be glad your primary entertainment works out of your house, because things aren’t looking good for the rest of it.

First, you’re all pretty well familiar with Blockbuster Video’s massive brick-and-mortar outlet problems, right?  We’ve been talking about them here at length.  But it’s not just Blockbuster that’s taking it on the chin from Netflix and Redbox.  It’s the local mom-and-pop video stores too.

As someone who worked in a video store for about three quarters of his high school career and then some in college, I have to admit this one hits me where I live.  Check this out.

”Video rental has always been about convenience and value, and that goes back to late 1977. It was the convenience of having to watch what you wanted from the comfort of your home with one set price,” said Sean Bersell, vice president of public affairs for the California-based Entertainment Merchants Association. ”That has always been the equation. Now we are seeing a different delivery channel come into the marketplace.”

Truth, Sean.  And with digital delivery and DVDs by mail, the convenience factor has shot up in favor of everybody else.  This is killing the local video store, because convenience can be had at so much higher levels elsewhere, and the value isn’t disproportionate.

This means that, for the local stores to survive, they’re going to have to do like the theaters themselves have to do and offer something no one else does.