The early days of home-video rental were a free-for-all. I don’t just mean the format wars between VHS and Beta. When my family briefly had a VCR in 1981, we had to rent movies literally from some guy’s basement. Appliance stores soon stepped into the breach, with video rentals as bait to sell VCRs and TVs. Then, in the space of a few years, my neighborhood in St. Louis went from zero dedicated video stores to a dozen, back down to two. Into this Wild West village came riding a passel of hungry outfits, each sure they’d figured out how to serve the vast majority of American households who would never be able to afford $1200 for a pricey VCR. All these hopefuls learned an expensive lesson in the risks of betting on today’s technology in tomorrow’s market… read more >
