Tired of Streaming? Home-Grown 'Free Blockbuster' Libraries Are Trying to Offer Alternatives (seattletimes.com) 27
In 2019 Los Angeles film/TV producer Brian Morrison painted Blockbuster's logo onto an old newspaper box — and then filled it up with used DVDs. "The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction," reports the New York Times — aided at times by social media — "and eventually more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain."
Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.
Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said.
Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University...
Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts).
But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."
Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.
Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said.
Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University...
Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts).
But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."
Re:Tired of streaming? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Watch VoDs of streams you like later.
Easier said than done. Some of us find it hard to not enter binge mode. I spent most of my weekend wasting away on the sofa binging iPlayer because I found something new.
With live TV I don’t have that problem. With recorded live TV I don’t have that problem and with my DVD/bluray collection, not only can I watch when I want just like with streaming, I also have the ability to watch *what* I want vs what I'm told I can watch at any one time.
For example, I logged into prime and a list popped up titled "leaving soon". What? Streaming has a long way to go before it lives up to the expectations that everyone claims to have for it. We went to it to watch EVERYTHING at ANYTIME, no such ability exists, not even the BBC archive is fully on iplayer and it is not just the case of waiting for the BBC to actually digitise and index everything (if they do, I'll rip out the antenna because I'll be set for the rest of my life, that’s true VOD there). No it's the usual "rights issues" crap that is foisted upon VOD/streaming like some kind of plague turning what should have been an all you can view utopia into nothing more than a TV channel. Yep, that’s what streaming is, it's just an on demand TV channel where you set the schedule but you don’t get to also chose the content.
My shelves don’t have that problem, they are stuffed full of stuff that was on streaming, but no longer is. There is stuff on my shelves that goes direct to DVD or bluray today, and never gets streamed.
Oh and another main reason why we went to streaming, to avoid the adverts. Guess how long that lasted :D
I'll wait for the real streaming solution to finally appear, a single service you sign up to, just one, where all others like paramount, netflix etc are all part of it and they get shares of your subscription based on what you watch. No longer will I pay for something like NowTV month after month yet never watch it, renting my account *just in case*. One service, one cost, everything available forever. They want to move shows about between themselves? Ok that’s fine as from where I would be sitting all that is behind the scenes, I never should know anything happened.
Right now we are at a similar stage as where IBM clones were. The "buy my computer!" vs "no BUY MY COMPUTER with the same specs but in a different colour" stage, but where we have “watch my service” vs “no WATCH MY SERVICE because we took star trek back” (yeah, never renting a Paramount account). I was the kid building my computer as I saw no point buying a premade one. So I build my own video library today, till the streaming services merge together into one homogenous service...
Streaming is entering a new challenging age, it’s struggling to keep sucking rent out of pockets while justifying it, my parents used to say “there’s nothing on” when looking at 50 or more FREE live TV channels, now they say the same about streaming, AppleTV, Disney+, Netflix and Prime “nothing is on, seen that, didn’t like that”. They are also just fed up with having multiple accounts, and now adverts too.
Let me know when VOD finally arrives.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect this is a language barrier. Streaming refers both to VoDs being served, and actual live content by people you enjoy watching.
I suggested the latter, not the former. Get off the postmodern entertainment garbage and watch the internet age entertainment garbage. It's different flavor at the very least.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Tired of streaming? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just like (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just like the community libraries here in the UK where outside of homes or generally anywhere we have community libraries, where you can swap books or take one to read and bring back.
A local garden centre has one, I offloaded a couple of unwanted books and swapped for a few on photography and an old computer hardware and repair book which has a tonne of info on older motherboards and cpu revisions.
In the UK we have been letting BT decommission old phone boxes (thankfully they are required to maintain them if the area is not adequately served from each of the 3 main mobile networks or where the area is an accident hotspot etc). Such old iconic red phone boxes, usually internationally recognised as a British icon, can be bought for £1 by the community and used as a defibrillator station or frequently a community library.
Thats mostly for books however but occasionally I have seen one that do the same for DVD's etc, although here its relatively easy and cheap to walk into a charity shop and walk out with handfuls of CD's and DVD's for next to nothing. I don’t sell any DVD's or blurays I am getting rid of on ebay etc as it costs too much time and money to do that for something that holds little to no value, even if it's brand new everyone expects a second-hand DVD to be less than £1 or so unless it's a collector’s item in which case you can rely on collectors prices. I usually take them to a charity shop but if someone converted a red phone box into a DVD swap I'll happily fill it as I have loads I have been upgrading to bluray etc.
"..we are social animals" (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. That's the last thing I want to do.
Regressive and futile (Score:1)
There's a multitude of reasons why physical media went away, and you're not making those reasons disappear by ensuring that a few idealists end up with all the work and frustration when people start taking advantage of the "free stuff". The small private take-one-leave-one book libraries all start with great hopes, but in the end, which comes quicker than you think, they're all collections of the garbage that people don't want to clutter their own shelves. With discs you will have the added problems that yo
Re: Regressive and futile (Score:2)
We can't fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying "we should fix what's wrong with current methods" suggests that individuals have power over how media is distributed. We don't. The only power individuals have is not to buy into what's currently on offer, and for that we need alternatives. The only alternatives I see involve piracy or using older media like DVDs. If you have another alternative, I'd love to hear it.
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Instead of clinging to outdated methods of distribution, we should fix what's wrong with current methods. The past is not going to come back better and improved.
If you're agreeing that the current method is broken, then we can work on a new solution AND enjoy older stuff at the same time. You can do both things. Otherwise, you'll be forever waiting for things to finally be fixed.
W/O a physical copy, you don't own it (Score:3)
Free candy? (Score:3)
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Yeah, not sure I would trust candy from a box where anyone can have unsupervised access. Call me distrustful...
True - for the extrovert majority (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:True - for the extrovert majority (Score:4, Insightful)
What was vastly preferable and has not changed, rental DVDs by mail (RIP). I don't mind content moving around from service to service (it's easy to find on justwatch.com) but content disappearing is an abuse of copyright IMO.
One of the main tenets of copyright is to make works available to the public! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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For those of us who do not belong to that majority his core argument does not cut any ice: streaming remains vastly preferable.
Must be nice to have fast reliable broadband that supports streaming. Not everyone has this luxury.
Perfect world (Score:3)
In a perfect world this might work, but in reality most of your DVD's will walk off never to be seen again.
Doesn't even have to be malicious - back in the real days of Netflix and Blockbuster people would keep DVD's all the time because they just forgot to take them back or were too lazy to. Plus a dwindling number of people even have DVD players at home. I could technically connect up an older game console but that's the only way I'd have to watch one now.
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No, I expect the opposite to be the problem. People who have moved to streaming will drop off their old DVD collections, leaving the box overflowing with DVDs people aren't borrowing.
We have a "buy nothing" group in our town, and people are giving away DVDs all the time. The library does monthly book sales of donated books that they aren't adding to their collection, and they also have tons of DVDs.
Also, in areas with good libraries, you can get most movies on DVD or BluRay there.
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And yet, the little libraries continue to thrive and exist.
The model works just fine. It's just a free library - a box someone put outside. It contains books, CDs, DVDs, whatever. If you walk by one, stop and peruse it. If you find something you like - you take it.
That's right, you take it. It's a free library - you take what you like, and when you pass by it again, you either return it, or drop off something you don't want.
Many other places have similar as well - they've existed at airports as well - if yo
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Industry will criminalize it (Score:4, Insightful)
If this practice becomes really popular, I bet movie industry associations will try to criminalize it and sue people for piracy.