Hollywood Video Is Not DVD Friendly

Until the other day it had been nearly a year since I visited my local
store and the reason was two fold. I only had gone in when I had
access to those 99 cent new dvd rentals and I had been unable to get a
hold of any and secondly in the past year or so my library has really
stepped up their dvd collection even to the point that they had
actually had on hand albeit a limited number of new Tuesday dvd
releases not unlike retail stores and if you were savvy enough you
could put your selections on request months in advance and about half
the time they were ready and waiting for you on Tuesday and if not
then within several weeks. What changed was I got some Hollywood Video
coupons this week so I went in to check it out. What a disappointment.
The new dvds were now mixed in with the new vhs rentals and when asked
about this I was told that this was a corporate decision. What was
even more disappointing is that Hollywood Video's special collections
ie. music videos and concerts and foreign language films had not
changed one bit since the last time I was in. YMMV. Bleech.

solipsistic@earthlink.net

> I only had gone in when I had
> access to those 99 cent new dvd rentals and I had been unable to get a
> hold of any and secondly in the past year or so my library has really
> stepped up their dvd collection even to the point that they had
> actually had on hand albeit a limited number of new Tuesday dvd
> releases not unlike retail stores and if you were savvy enough you
> could put your selections on request months in advance and about half
> the time they were ready and waiting for you on Tuesday and if not
> then within several weeks.

That's the longest sentence I've seen in a long time.

Nonymous

It seems "" wrote in alt.video.dvd:
>The new dvds were now mixed in with the new vhs rentals and when asked
>about this I was told that this was a corporate decision.

Cutting all the excess verbiage, this seems to be how you concluded
that Hollywood is not "DVD friendly".

News flash: Some people will only accept a movie on DVD. Others just
want to get the movie. Maybe they don't care about format at all,
maybe they prefer DVD but will accept VHS. I submit that the people
who would rather not watch a new release at all than watch it on VHS
are a minority.

Therefore Hollywood's decision is correct because it serves the
majority better and doesn't hurt the minority. Even for the "must
have DVD, won't take VHS" crowd, how exactly is it a problem that
both formats of a given title are shelved together? Do you feel
somehow that DVDs are polluted by mere proximity to VHS?

My real issue with Hollywood -- and Blockbuster too -- is that I can
never find anything in new releases because they have declared war
on the alphabet. Movies starting with L are shelved anywhere from
about G to Q, for instance. It's not that the shelves are mixed up,
it's that they have their own system and deliberately use their own
special corporate version of alphabetizing.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
DVD FAQ: http://dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
other FAQs: http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/faqget.htm

Stan Brown

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 13:23:44 -0500, "Nonymous" <>
wrote:

>> I only had gone in when I had
>> access to those 99 cent new dvd rentals and I had been unable to get a
>> hold of any and secondly in the past year or so my library has really
>> stepped up their dvd collection even to the point that they had
>> actually had on hand albeit a limited number of new Tuesday dvd
>> releases not unlike retail stores and if you were savvy enough you
>> could put your selections on request months in advance and about half
>> the time they were ready and waiting for you on Tuesday and if not
>> then within several weeks.
>
>That's the longest sentence I've seen in a long time.

Hah! You are not the first one to call me on that. I do it all the
time. You should read my "bad" Hemingway contest submissions. Here is
another one under a different nick:

http://tinyurl.com/3dfqb


>
>

solipsistic@earthlink.net

In article <>, Stan Brown
<> wrote:

> Therefore Hollywood's decision is correct because it serves the
> majority better and doesn't hurt the minority. Even for the "must
> have DVD, won't take VHS" crowd, how exactly is it a problem that
> both formats of a given title are shelved together? Do you feel
> somehow that DVDs are polluted by mere proximity to VHS?
>
In fact, look at it as a way to ease the migration to DVD. Those
without players can see that all the films they want are also on DVD,
and look at the listing of extras before they pick up the VHS copy. For
older titles, if it's not on DVD yet the fact that there's an old VHS
version on the shelf may get DVD owners to break down and rent it.

> My real issue with Hollywood -- and Blockbuster too -- is that I can
> never find anything in new releases because they have declared war
> on the alphabet. Movies starting with L are shelved anywhere from
> about G to Q, for instance. It's not that the shelves are mixed up,
> it's that they have their own system and deliberately use their own
> special corporate version of alphabetizing.

Haven't seen any of that locally, but they sometimes group related
films together on the new release wall that throws the order off.

--
Chris Mack "Refugee, total ****. That's how I've always seen us.
'Invid Fan' Not a help, you'll admit, to agreement between us."
-'Deal/No Deal', CHESS

Invid Fan

Stan Brown wrote on [Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:20:33 -0500]:
> My real issue with Hollywood -- and Blockbuster too -- is that I can
> never find anything in new releases because they have declared war
> on the alphabet. Movies starting with L are shelved anywhere from
> about G to Q, for instance. It's not that the shelves are mixed up,
> it's that they have their own system and deliberately use their own
> special corporate version of alphabetizing.

My issues with BB is that they charge 4 bucks a rental

Justin

In article <>,
Stan Brown <> wrote:

> Cutting all the excess verbiage, this seems to be how you concluded
> that Hollywood is not "DVD friendly".
>
> News flash: Some people will only accept a movie on DVD. Others just
> want to get the movie. Maybe they don't care about format at all,
> maybe they prefer DVD but will accept VHS. I submit that the people
> who would rather not watch a new release at all than watch it on VHS
> are a minority.
>
> Therefore Hollywood's decision is correct because it serves the
> majority better and doesn't hurt the minority. Even for the "must
> have DVD, won't take VHS" crowd, how exactly is it a problem that
> both formats of a given title are shelved together? Do you feel
> somehow that DVDs are polluted by mere proximity to VHS?

But why do these rental outlets feel the need to continue wasting
precious shelf space with a 'WAY past it's expiration date' garbage
format that's only appealing to bottom feeder demographics who have no
quality standards? All they're doing is pro-longing the life of a format
that was crap 30 years ago and is just utter **** today. You don't see
the major sell-through only outlets like Circuit City and Best Buy
wasting their shelf space with VHS and there's a reason for that. I also
find it rather ironic that Netflix, who has huge warehouses of storage
space, still don't waste that space with VHS, yet the little tiny at the
corner Blockbuster and Hollywood Video do. Personally I think they
should simply stop carrying new releases on VHS and maybe just designate
a small section of their store for VHS titles that still aren't
available on DVD. Sure, they'll argue "But we still make money off of
VHS rentals!" Yeah, and Circuit City still made money off of VHS sales
when they pulled the plug on it. The reality is VHS losers only account
for a measily 25% of the home video market now. And to make matters
worse, most of the VHS crowd(what's left of it) only seldom rent
anything to begin with. Blockbuster's bread and butter now comes from
DVD rentals and they could easily drop VHS without putting a dent in
their profits. The major sell-through outlets woke up and realized the
days of POS "videa tapes" are long behind us and it's now time that the
rental outlets realize the same thing. Until this happens that small
group of backwards thinking "I refuse to buy a DEEVEEDEE player! I wuv
mah videas!" idiots will infact never buy a DVD player. You've gotta
force technically challenged retards like this to buy a DVD player just
like they were forced to buy a CD player back when CD's replaced vinyl
and audio cassette tapes.
--
BL

Black Locust

In article <310120041853187342%>,
Invid Fan <> wrote:

> In fact, look at it as a way to ease the migration to DVD. Those
> without players can see that all the films they want are also on DVD,
> and look at the listing of extras before they pick up the VHS copy. For
> older titles, if it's not on DVD yet the fact that there's an old VHS
> version on the shelf may get DVD owners to break down and rent it.

That doesn't hold much water. Next time you're in Blockbuster or
Hollywood, observe the VHS renters. You'll often find that they don't
even touch the DVD cover boxes even if there's 50 DVD cover boxes and
only 2 VHS cover boxes on the shelf for that particular movie. They're
surrounded by DVD's everywhere they go and they damn well know that VHS
is done with, but they'll still go out of their way to get the "hot new
releases" on VHShit. Likely the only thing going through their pea sized
brains is "All dem DEEVEEDEE's get scwatched up. These videas will pway
just fine on mah VCR." Now we all know this is a stupid argument
considering all the other countless problems inherent to VHS despite
it's protective caddie, but when you can't even put together 2+2=4 this
is the only rationalization that you can come up with.
--
BL

Black Locust

In article <bl2112->, Black
Locust <> wrote:

> In article <310120041853187342%>,
> Invid Fan <> wrote:
>
> > In fact, look at it as a way to ease the migration to DVD. Those
> > without players can see that all the films they want are also on DVD,
> > and look at the listing of extras before they pick up the VHS copy. For
> > older titles, if it's not on DVD yet the fact that there's an old VHS
> > version on the shelf may get DVD owners to break down and rent it.
>
> That doesn't hold much water. Next time you're in Blockbuster or
> Hollywood, observe the VHS renters.

I have no real desire, as I don't care what others do I have rented
vhs when there's been no dvd release yet, though, and it was nice not
having to search two sections of the store (one to see if there was a
dvd or not, then over to see if they still carried the vhs).

--
Chris Mack "Refugee, total ****. That's how I've always seen us.
'Invid Fan' Not a help, you'll admit, to agreement between us."
-'Deal/No Deal', CHESS

Invid Fan