News recently passed our newsfeed of the very last Blockbuster store left in America (And yes, we prefer to get our news about the U.S. from BBC World News).    You can attribute it to cable, as some may do, or to streaming video like Netflix, but the more I stream videos the more I miss blockbuster.  Why?  Because of the trend for companies like Google and Amazon to “sell” you a movie but to refuse to let you download and keep the video you “own” – something that has been the standard for several years now.   The whole process of going out to Amazon and seeing a label that says “you own this video” but not being able to keep in on my hard drive is like going to a store to buy a pair of pants but being told “You can buy the pants but you have to wear them here.”

This has, of course, been mitigated by the fact that Netflix has allowed customers to download videos for some time now and watch them offline for a limited time.  Yes, we are aware that Amazon did it first, but there is a difference.  Even as an Amazon Prime member there are vast swathes of videos that Amazon wants you to buy for the privilege of watching.  It wouldn’t be so bad if it was possible to rent the videos, but increasingly there are videos that if you want to see them  you cant rent them.  This was brought to mind recently when I wanted to rent the World of Warcraft Movie recently with the live action version of Ghost in the Shell as a close second. Both, as it turns out, require a purchase and cannot be rented.  Is this because both movies bombed at the box office and producers are trying to recoup there losses?  The time was that a catchphrase was “I will watch it when it comes out on video” was the thing.  But you can’t rent it from Blockbuster any more, because there aren’t any.  Increasingly you can’t rent it from Amazon or Google any more…you can only buy it for close to what it would have cost you to watch it in the theater in the first place.

So do we just go along with it? Not a chance.  We just stopped buying videos altogether.  If we can’t rent it and can’t stream it on Netflix there are plenty of alternatives.