Selection

At Medium's "The Blklist" blog, Kate Hagen offers a very extensive review of the death of the chain video store, its few remaining outlets and the strength of independent video rental stores in Los Angeles. Hagen's piece touches on several aspects of these events, and if you don't live in Los Angeles you might decide that section of the article merits mostly a scan and not careful reading.

Now, I usually don't precisely stream content through either of the services that I use. I usually download it to the iPad as a "rental" and then watch it on the treadmill at the gym -- which does not have wi-fi -- and then it conveniently disappears if I for some reason forget to delete it. And of course I can pay cash for a rental as well, with a title that I can download and watch sometime within the next month.

But as Hagen's piece notes, the number of titles available to people who want to stream content is, well, pathetic when you compare it to the number of titles that even a small video place had in stock. Many have barely four digits in their catalog, with one or two having five. And many of those, said at least one person whose exercise routine involves frequent use of the service, suck.

Hagen also points out that many classic titles aren't available to stream, and the catalogs themselves don't go back more than a quarter century. Search engines seem optimized to push the company's own content, making a search beyond their sometimes quirky categories frustrating.

She outlines a couple of groups that are trying to find a way to start an actual video rental store, combining tactics like crowdsource funding and actual donations from people who want to help. Or who want to unload the crappy discs they have on someone else; one of the would-be store runners said the call for open donations brought in a lot of copies of Adam Sandler movies and Borat.

The title deficit is not all on the streamers, of course. Some movies have complicated ownership or distribution rights. Some featured music that was licensed only for a finite time (watch any episode of WKRP in Cincinnati from the 2007 20th Century Fox DVD release to hear what kind of a problem that can create).

The frustration that the limited catalogs provide can make a person consider buying DVDs of favorite movies and building a personal collection to make up what the streamers lack. Then the reality that these would have to be boxed up and moved and that one is in a profession where such things happen sets in, and one just makes do. The Wedding Singer's not that bad, after all.