DVDs are here to stay

Times Reporter

 

With the outbreak of Netflix and the closing of big box video stores one has to wonder, are DVD’s on the way out?

“They all closed for different reasons actually,” said Ed McCune, owner of Strathmore’s Video Gallery. 

“Rogers has been planning to close for years actually, they’ve been planning to get out of the video industry for five or six years. People in Calgary might have noticed all their stores have been gradually closing down their DVD sections and just going straight to cell phones, they’re doing online stuff as well.”

Financial problems and extreme debts are what close down stores like Blockbuster and the Movie Gallery. The big corporations overextended themselves and eventually had to liquidate in order to be able to buy their way out of some of the debt. 

Even with the creation of Netflix, McCune isn’t too concerned about losing business.

“The media keeps putting out that the big problem for video stores is Netflix. If you ever look at Netflix, if you ever took their free month, you’d realize it’s not an issue. They’re totally in a different business than I am,” said McCune.

“They carry old, crappy movies, they don’t have good licensing because licensing is expensive.  So they can’t carry any Disney stuff or any of the really good newer movies. They have to wait a year before they can have them, and then they are so expensive that they usually only have the ‘B’ rated movies. That’s all they ever carry.”

McCune said he feels the biggest competition is out there for video storeowners, such as him, is TV. Things like Shaw Video on Demand and other similar programs make travelling to the video store less appealing. Even then he still thinks the real deal of a video store wins out, at least with some people. 

“Especially in small towns there’s still quite a bit of demand for people wanting to rent videos. It’s a different experience. There are various options for digital, but they only carry a few of the top hits, they don’t always have everything and you get it for 24 hours. If something happens you have to rent it again, and if it doesn’t work too bad you have to rent it again,” said McCune.

“They don’t have the selection a video store has, we have all kinds of smaller titles that they don’t carry at all. The only thing that they’ve got that I don’t have is convenience. People have to get out of their house to come down here. 

“That’s the only thing. We have better prices, we have better selection, we have better customer service, if there’s an issue or a problem we can give out a free rental or whatever, they won’t do that at Shaw. We can give advice to people on what they’d like.”

McCune goes out of his way once a month browsing the pawnshops in Calgary to search out old hits that can’t be found anywhere else. He usually finds 20 to 30 titles a month that he then adds to the store’s classic hits room. 

He said he has customers that drive in from Calgary and even as far as Bassano to browse, or purchase the movies.

“There’s still a lot of people that like to browse and pick out movies, they don’t want to just click on the TV, they want to come down and browse and that’s where we fill a niche too.”