— First, people decided they didn’t want to drive to the movie theater.
These days they aren’t too keen on driving to the video store, either.
In a sign of the times,
Brick and mortar video stores are under pressure
from the online world, just like record stores and booksellers before
them. We want to rent DVDs quickly by mail or pick them up at the
supermarket. And that’s if we bother handling a physical disc at all.
Increasingly, we just stream movies on laptops and smart phones or
download them right to our PlayStations or Xboxes, so we can watch them
on our flat-panel TVs.
“The model has changed,” said Maithu Bai, owner of Awesome Video, an independent video rental store in
Nearly 14 million people subscribed to
as of the end of March. In 2009, the company’s subscriber base
ballooned by 31 percent, including more than 1.5 million new
subscribers in the fourth quarter alone.
Though it started out shipping videos by mail,
online rental options and ships movies by mail. But its legacy of
physical stores has been hard to shake. The company posted a loss of
Hollywood Video’s parent,
“There’s only so many consumers to go around,” and
“That says everything about how viewers’ access to
video is changing,” Plunkett said. “The thing to watch over the short
and long term is (whether) storefronts survive at all with their
current business model.”
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(c) 2010, The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.).
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