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Old 14th Mar 2020, 8:53 pm   #21
hamid_1
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

This is bringing back a few memories ...

In Bristol in the 1980s there were many videotape rental shops. Bernco Video in Brislington was one of the first that I remember; they used to advertise in the local free newspaper "Bristol Journal" with a list of popular movies in stock. "Porky's" was one title that springs to mind.

Soopervision and Ritz Video came later. They had several branches in the city.

Unusually, there was one shop in the Speedwell area of Bristol called Super Flicks! which rented only Betamax videotapes - not VHS. I recall that it survived in that form until 1990, by which time pre-recorded Betamax movies were no longer being produced. I'm not sure what happened after that, as I moved out of Bristol then. But I do recall in 1990 seeing the streets of Bristol littered with unwanted Betamax video recorders left out for the dustmen. It was quite clear that video recorders were mainly being used for viewing pre-recorded tapes. Once that supply had gone, they were worthless.

There were of course some shops which specialized in Bollywood movies, aimed at Indian / Pakistani immigrants, long before they had dedicated satellite TV channels. Indeed it was the coming of satellite and cable TV that started to kill off video rental. Now, on-demand online consumption has almost killed off physical media, both audio and video.

A couple of other places I recall in the Acton area of London in the early 1990s, Birdi Video (also a newsagent and convenience store) and Video Kraze 2 which was run by an Indian guy called Chris from Alperton. When the shop closed down I bought a bulk lot of ex-rental Betamax videotapes from him. I still have quite a lot of them, some of which pre-date the 1984 Video Recordings Act which made age-certificates mandatory. I'm not actually sure what to do with these, or if it's legal to own or sell them.
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Old 14th Mar 2020, 9:11 pm   #22
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

You don't need to worry about having pre-cert tapes anymore. All that fuss has thankfully long since died down. If you want to sell them, your main problem is that they're Betamax. There are still some enthusiasts with Beta machines, but they're a very small minority, and not as easily sold as vhs tapes.

Just noticed that you're in High Wycombe. I used to live there. There was an independent rental shop on on the main road in from West Wycombe at the time, and closer to the town centre on the same road waa a Blockbusters. I used to live next door to a TV repair shop, and round the corner was a quite large rental outlet specialising in Bollywood films only.

In Birmingham, in the Chinese quarter, the arcadian centre used to have a grocery store that sold a small number of vhs and vcd's. Directly across from it was a Chinese film rental store. They only did vcd's (and eventually dvd's). Used to love looking at the posters for all their films.

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Old 14th Mar 2020, 9:55 pm   #23
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

There were lots of local video shops around the east side of Nottingham. As others have posted it was a license to print money, if only for a relatively short while. In Nottingham, VHS reigned supreme. Beta accounted for less than 30% and many shops did not bother with V2000. Most of the independents were gone by the late 90's, Blockbuster was the last to go.

It all largely past me by, I can't sit for more than 30min's without getting fed up. I only rented out 10 films ever, and to this day I never watch a movie on TV.

Mind you, did extract a lot of tapes from machines, for a small fee of course for a few local shops!

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Last edited by samjmann; 14th Mar 2020 at 9:57 pm. Reason: Typo error.
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Old 14th Mar 2020, 10:04 pm   #24
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

There was an item in the papers a few years ago of a small rental shop in the Isle of Wight I think, being sucessfully prosecued by Trading Standards for renting out pre-cert Betamax videos. His excuse that he was only meeting demand from his numerous Betamax customers and that no post-cert Betamax videos were available was to no avail.
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Old 14th Mar 2020, 10:28 pm   #25
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Around the corner to us in Leasowe’s Avenue, Coventry was a small convenience store that had about 50 VHS films to hire. Not long after we were married I took the opportunity of the Christmas break to borrow the Panasonic video player from work and hired a couple of films. “Porky’s” was one of them, I laughed ‘till I cried! It would be a few years until we had a VHS machine of our own, before that we dabbled with the Philips V2000 system. The only place I ever saw V2000 pre-recorded tapes was in “Spicer’s” Hertford Street, Coventry. They had about 25!

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Old 15th Mar 2020, 12:32 am   #26
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Some video shops also rented games, one of the ones I mentioned above also let you rent the consoles for a deposit, normally for a weekend

Some of my school friends did this because they couldn't afford to buy one.

In the early days of video shops some very obscure films that would struggle to get released at the cinema managed to go straight to tape.

Italian Sword & Sorcery & Martial Arts films were common to be released this way, along with a lot of American independent films.
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Old 15th Mar 2020, 1:34 pm   #27
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

All this discussion about VHS Tapes reminded me, having access to several VCR's and a tape library a fair bit of workshop copying went on. (not me guv)
Being as it was in the early 80's, we were all in Del Boy mode and through a work colleague's father who chauffeured rich arabs between the Dorchester and Harrods, we discovered a lucrative market for copies of Jane Fonda's Work out tape.

Which we were happy supply, at £20 a pop, luvverly Jubberly.
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Old 15th Mar 2020, 3:14 pm   #28
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

In the Nineties, Charlie and I were based in the workshop (aka 'chicken shed') with Raymond doing the collections and deliveries. This wasn't full time for him so it fitted in nicely with his evening job. He had a large VW hi-top van. all racked out with video tapes for hire. Just like a mobile library, you could walk in the van and look round, rent a couple and pre-order the latest films. He did the rounds of the estates on allotted days, renting out on (say) a Tuesday and back on Thursday to collect the tapes. Of course, sometimes customers complained their video was broken so back to the workshop it came - a win-win for all of us.
I sold him a Double Decker - no idea what he used it for!
When DVDs came out he saw the writing was on the wall for tape rental, which coincided with a downturn in our business, so he sold the library and took a job with the Council.
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Old 18th Mar 2020, 8:22 pm   #29
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

As has been mentioned. 'naughty' VHS-replication was a big thing in the 80s and 90s: I built a few 'multiple-output UHF distribution-amplifiers' - generally something like a 2N5109 feeding into a classic indictive/resistive power-divider network. One of these could - allegedly - supply 30 or so downstream recorders.

"Dodgy Dave" down the pub and "Sleazy Sanjay" at the local corner-store were good customers.

It was always VHS they wanted. Zero demand for Betamax or V2000 knockoff tapes!

To this day it's kinda fun to Google for long-closed local/regional video-rental shops.

Searching for "Video Solent" still reveals quite a few entries for a business that has been extinct for nearly 20 years! I guess the Internet [or, in particular, 'Yell' - which was the successor to Yellow Pages] never forgets.
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Old 18th Mar 2020, 11:23 pm   #30
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Our local rental shop was a couple of portakabins in the corner of the Airport Filling Station at Meir. There was also one attached to an off-licence in a nearby town.
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Old 20th Mar 2020, 3:21 pm   #31
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Quote:
Originally Posted by electronicskip View Post
Actually that's now reminded me, there was a video rental shop in Gloucester called V2000 or something that had V2000 videotapes for rent although I never went in there myself as I rented from Blockbuster.
It did other formats later in life ... I did some repairs of the guy in the 90's. He also had a rental business, not only tellys and videos, but almost anything... carpets, cookers... all sorts he'd rent people. I forget what that part of the business was called. They always paid promptly though ...
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Old 20th Mar 2020, 5:29 pm   #32
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

I don't recall a video rental shop in Ramsbottom but I'm sure there would have been at least one. That might be because I never used them though. It was certainly a very popular and trendy social activity like carrying a brick sized phone [if you could afford it]. I recall getting friends to tape things on VHS for me long before I even obtained a VCR! There was absolutely no concept of films being shown endlessly on numerous channels in the UK then, or any expectation [despite me having seen that all in action during a 1977 visit to friends in Canada]. You sometimes waited years for a film to be shown again at the whim of schedulers. I suppose it was a bit like people buying vinyl in recent times without owning a player but resulting from different in circumstances. s
I think the two brothers who ran a TV/Radio Repair Shop on Bridge Street [only closed down in 2018-now a trendy tea shop!] may have done Video Rentals but I'm not sure and if so, it wasn't extensive.

When I did get a recorder [circa 1982] I was more pre-occupied with being able to archive films from the BBC and Ch4 [after 1982] plus other program material broadcast on the four channels available. The commercial outlets didn't seem to have much that I would want to rent anyway, there was no access to specialist renters and as blank tape was not at all cheap, I probably preferred to spend money on that rather than a renting an item I then had to return. Plus I didn't have a second machine to facilitate copying. I'm not short of "ex-rental" tapes these days but usually obtained for next to nothing.

A related story. In 1979 I saw the film about Gurdjief the Mystic "Meetings With Remarkable Men" produced and directed by Peter Blake [of theatrical fame] at a pretty much empty cinema in Rawtentstall. It quickly disappeared from "view", along with a limited VHS edition, due to some sort of dispute with the family estate [I think]. I searched for years and finally found it listed in a shop at Mosley in Birmingham. The chap said it wasn't for sale but I could rent it. I then realised that his Video Shop was just around the corner from my son's Specialist "Dub Platter" record shop/cafe. They'd just had a baby and lived in a small [rented] house. I took up a 14" monitor plus a VCR from Sussex. The guy at the shop realised I was Jon's dad so wouldn't accept a rental charge" [which I would have very happily paid]. I then spent a stressful time crawling around the back of the TV at their home while the baby cried and an assortment of various visitors/musicians etc turned up to see her. I just couldn't get a monitor image on either screen no matter how I tried and had to fly blind trying to make a copy in the end, convinced there would only be a blank recording for my trouble.
To my delight, playback in Sussex revealed I had managed to get a recording
It has since come out on DVD but is still rare. Mine is a Spanish copy [via a great stall on Bury Market that seems to be able to dig out the rarest items] but thankfully, it's not overdubbed.

Dave W

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Old 21st Mar 2020, 2:18 am   #33
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Renting videos wasn't something we did. When tapes got cheap in the 90s we bought a bunch, but before and after then we religiously taped every film and tv programme, LP mode, on a rubbish Matsui video recorder.
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Old 21st Mar 2020, 8:45 am   #34
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

In the Bexleyheath area in the early 80's we had 'Broadway Video' (Bexleyheath main shopping area is known as that hence the name) they had a series of shops spread about with a yellow frontage and could be the only shop still open late into the evening in places. You could either pay £3 a year or £30 'for life' membership, like an idiot I paid the £30, a fair chunk of money for me, to find that a year later it was 'free membership'! The thing I do remember is that I would use one of the smaller branches in Crayford which never had any of the recent films in (easier to park outside) so we ended up watching things like 'Attack of the killer tomatoes'.
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Old 22nd Mar 2020, 5:53 pm   #35
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

My first ever video rental was when i was working in Oxford after leaving school , and was from the indoor market there, I think I still have my membership card somewhere around the place.

The first video tape I rented was Star Trek the movie on Betamax.
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Old 22nd Mar 2020, 6:39 pm   #36
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Hi,
Locally I recall a couple who owned a small video rental/hire shop in a remote East Cleveland village, around ten miles North (ish) of Whitby whom my ex wife worked for driving a van around the area hiring out VHS video tapes, audio cassette tapes and possibly some sort of game cartridges.

From memory there were three van drivers who covered a reasonable area over the North Yorkshire moors/coastline and thereabouts.

I also obtained a fair few private repair jobs when anyone required their machines repairing.

Andrew
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Old 12th Apr 2020, 11:41 am   #37
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else have 'local video shop' memorabilia? As in membership cards, or thier own sleeves that most used to use rather than lending out in the original boxes? I have a few things along this line. I have the shop name sign from a closed-down local store in bits in the corner of my office. I'd like to be able to reassemble it and put it up, but it's a bit too big and impractical for my current home.
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Old 12th Apr 2020, 7:44 pm   #38
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Default Re: Video Rental Shops - who do you remember locally?

Apart from quite a lot of ex-rental tapes, one piece of video shop memorabilia in my own collection is an old payphone that came from a video shop in Micklefield Road, High Wycombe (they also had Sega and Nintendo game cartridges as well as movies). Some time after the shop closed, I saw the owner in a car boot sale, who sold me the payphone from his former shop. It's really only a collector's item, as it requires old 10p / 2 shilling coins, but since I also have a little collection of old phones, it fits in with them nicely.

There was another member on this forum called 2ombieboy who I believe collected video shop stuff. He also had a YouTube channel. I don't know if he's still active on here.
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