Oh, the humanity... Why streaming is a video nasty

Although I love my Netflix nights, I can’t help pining for the good old days of browsing video stores.

The last time I rented a video was a rainy day in the winter of 2015. I remember hurrying into the shelter of the Video Ezy in Pt Chevalier with my girlfriend at the time. It smelled like toast. We moseyed through racks of endless possibility, and brought our selection back to her parent’s house. A few months later, that store closed down permanently.

Now Video Ezy is pulling out of New Zealand altogether. In its heyday, it had 135 branches; today there are six. If the bigbox franchises can’t make it work, no wonder most of the independent shops are already long gone.

My mates worked at an indie video store through high school and uni. We endlessly quoted Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks, hung around the shop, and occasionally even patronised it. Towards the end, the manager tacked ever-more-desperate additions onto my friends’ job descriptions: one week they were ice-cream men, then baristas, then dubbing videos, editing photos, providing Sky decoders, acting as courier drop-offs. None of it was enough to keep the store afloat.

Netflix, iTunes, and all the other streaming and downloading services have all but killed off the video store. These technological marvels are cheap, convenient, and streamlined. While I ought to be applauding the new age of abundance, I can’t help but feel something is being lost in the transition.

As I will one day tell my disbelieving grandkids, renting a movie used to be an event. First, you had to put on pants. Then you had to actually leave the house. And that was only the beginning: once you got to the store, the shelves proffered thousands of glossy titles for your consideration. There’d be weird films that were rented once a year, long-forgotten favourites, and unexpected gems – a product of the store owner’s quirks, rather than massive international licensing agreements.

Your mission was one of active discernment. Without a mindless algorithm to tell you what you like, you’d pick the cases up, turn them in your hands, put them back, compare one with another. Sometimes – and at this point, the grandkids recoil in horror – you’d have to interact with real-life human beings. You might ask the clerk for advice, or compare notes on a recent viewing. At the very least, there’d be small-talk at the counter. And that was if you were going it alone: with friends or family, you would undoubtedly end up in heated debate over the relative merits of Marvel versus DC, or trying to convince your girlfriend that House of 1000 Corpses was basically a rom-com.

After all that negotiation and selection, you’d be invested in your precious bounty of discs long before they saw the inside of the DVD player. There was no idle browsing the web for something more stimulating, with 20 tabs open on three different devices. Instead, you’d sit down, and unless the movie was astonishingly bad, watch it to the end. A few days or weeks later, you’d drop them back to the store, and repeat the whole exhausting, stimulating, moderately-expensive ordeal again.

Streaming video services are so cheap and convenient that you can treat yourself every day. But by definition, that’s not a treat: it’s like having an allyou-can-eat buffet installed in your bedroom.

There’s no human connection here, no purpose or intent, no moment of discovery. Watching Netflix is not an event, it’s the most mundane activity imaginable, as automatic and unthinking as performing a bodily function.

Of course, I’m as ensnared by this parasite of passivity as anyone. And so, even as I settle in for another night of instant gratification, mindless browsing, and Dorito-dusted sheets, I can’t help but feel a brief pang of nostalgia for the video store, and wonder if the future of technology is really as bright as we have been promised.

‘ Streaming video services are so cheap and convenient that you can treat yourself every single day.’

Got a burning money question? Email Budget Buster at richard.meadows@thedeepdish.org, or hit him up on Facebook, where you can also find links to previous Budget Busters.