Assignment 3-The Devils Advocate.

     I chose to change my research topic mid stream and left American Politics for the somewhat innocuous idea of what killed the video store. What comes to mind immediately is that the digital age killed the video store but some areas that were not fully understood was primarily what video store? It is true to say that there are far fewer neighbourhood video stores but the most noticeable absence in the video store market is the lack of blue. Blockbusters blue signage that adorned almost every mini mall and big box shopping centre has disappeared entirely and not all because of the so called direct to viewer revolution. They lost to Netflix. They could not change fast enough to compete with the Netflix model. Netflix themselves could not even compete with their own model as they have tried to reinvent themselves and lost the mail order movie rental market and their streaming video is mostly unpalatable oldies you can see on Turner Classics 8 days a week.
     That Blockbuster lost to Netflix is a given, but the collateral damage in that war of rentals saw the loss of the neighbourhood video store, the convenience store that had a room on the side for movies, the ability to view, on one wall, a thousand titles and to rent a new release for the low, low price of 5 bucks. Sure the digital age provided a lot of competition, but it was the model itself that could not hold. Now the movie studios and distributors have a new model, they just sell you the movie at Walmart or Amazon at 30.00 dollars a crack, no license fees, no fee's per views ratios just direct to consumer. No muss, no fuss, you buy it you own it and the studio get a good slice of the revenue. It will be tough to move them off this position and with streaming video still a quagmire of who should pay who for what I do not think we will ever see a resurgence of the mom and pop video rental store or have the ease of legal access to a new release when Blockbuster had a hundred copies on the wall.