👓 Soon There Will Be Only One Blockbuster Left in the United States | The New York Times

Read Soon There Will Be Only One Blockbuster Left in the United States (nytimes.com)
The upcoming closings of two Blockbuster video stores in Alaska will leave one store in central Oregon as the last one in the United States.

👓 OER 18: Reclaim Video & Cloudron | Lauren Brumfield

Read OER 18: Reclaim Video & Cloudron by Lauren Brumfield (labrumfield.com)
Now that I’m on the tail end of this trip, I feel like I can finally wrap my head around the last 10 days and gather my thoughts for a blog post. Last week, the Reclaim team met in Bristol for the OER 18 Conference. The entire experience was definitely a mix of ups and downs, but that’s not a result of OER’s doing; I got sick and had to back out of the second day of the conference & my presentation slot. (Ugh, talk about timing.) It was a huge bummer to prepare so hard for something to then not have a chance to share it, but I’m incredibly grateful to be apart of such a solid team that was able to step in for me. Apparently, they rocked the house!

👓 Coming Soon: Reclaim Video | bavatuesdays

Read Coming Soon: Reclaim Video by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
The idea of running a video rental store has been bouncing around at Reclaim Hosting for over a year now. When we started renovating the CoWork space/Reclaim Headquarters over a year ago we realized we would soon have a vacant strip mall storefront at our disposal. I started floating the idea of a video rental store to Tim, but given he was knee-deep in actually designing and building CoWork with Lauren, those discussions were postponed. At this point it was not clear how it related to anything else we already do, namely run Reclaim Hosting and CoWork—it was just a fun idea.
This is an awesome sounding idea. I’d love to hear more about it. I know that folks like Kevin Smokler and David Dylan Thomas are going to flip over it.

Despite the fact that it seems like a lot of fun, I’m curious how they’re going to make sure it doesn’t bring down the bottom line and put anything else in jeopardy. I certainly get the fun part, but the minimal break even portion doesn’t sound like it’s quite there to me.

The tough part of the physical media game is that these are magnetic tapes. While many of my 90’s VHS tapes are relatively fine, my VHS from the early 80’s are in worse shape. Tougher is having machines to play these successfully on. This post reminds me a lot of the difficulties I’ve heard from UCLA Film & Television archivists doing work on tapes themselves.

👓 We Want Your VHS! | bavatuesdays

Read We Want Your VHS! by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
If you have some old VHS hanging around the house, yet have gotten rid of your VCR long ago—it might be high time to let Reclaim Video take them off your hands. Rather than letting them sit around collecting dust...
Interesting…