As I write this, Netflix Australia has about 3700 titles available to watch. Some will inevitably come out of rotation as more are added. Your average video store would have, as a minimum, around 10,000 titles. Once purchased by the store, those titles would stay with the store. While streaming certainly is a substantially more convenient way to get content into your face, as compared to driving down to the local video store and paying money to rent out a stack of DVDs, it certainly did offer some things that streaming couldn’t.
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Unfortunately, this was not enough to keep physical video rental the giant it once was, and we are horrifyingly close to seeing the end of the once-mighty Blockbuster, with its last Australian incarnation finally pulling the plug.
The Blockbuster in the Perth suburb of Morley will be doing its last ever rentals tomorrow, before it starts selling off stock and shelving. The Morley store had only very recently become Australia’s last, with the closure of another Blockbuster in Toowoomba, Queensland taking place just at the start of the year.
After the closure of these two Australian stores and the closure of the last two in Alaska last year, there is now only one Blockbuster left in the world, in Bend, Oregon.
While it might very nearly be the end of Blockbuster, it’s not necessarily the end of the video store as we know it. Non-profit cooperatives like Baltimore‘s Beyond Video offer an example of a way that video stores can still offer huge, value-heavy selections, be affordable to use, and actually manage to keep their doors open. Fingers crossed something sick like that happens in Australia.
