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.
Hi Chris.
Thanks for highlighting our Reclaim Video work. It should prove very fun, but to be clear we have no illusions that this will be profitable. In fact, we are doing it with the idea it won’t be. In fact, this is a way to draw attention to the ethos that built the foundation of Reclaim Hosting: building community around fun things; preserving a bit of the past; and enjoying trailing edge technologies and media.
In fact, Reclaim Video is a way for us to deflect any direct promotion, sponsorship, or any other vendor-like behavior a company like ours eventually becomes accosted with. If we want to promote a conference or organization (or even individuals) we can do it indirectly as a cutting edge VHS/VCR outfit 🙂 And ideally, but not necessarily, Reclaim Video can become an indirect driver of interest in Reclaim Hosting. But all this comes back to doing something fun with no real expectations it will be profitable or even resonate with most folks. We understand this is an indulgent campaign, and therefore are prepared for the worst.
I have wondered if video stores would ever find their place in physical media ecosystem say the way, record stores did with the rebirth of vinyl.