What was the first-ever video rental store, and where is it?
As someone born in 2001, I only caught the tail end of the video rental store phenomenon. Still, I have vivid memories of my parents taking me to Blockbuster after school and letting me pick out a VHS or a DVD to watch, enamoured by the rows of titles up for grabs.
You had to pick carefully. Unlike streaming, you couldn’t just turn off your film and scroll through endless options to find a different movie to watch if you didn’t like the one you’d settled on – your choice had to be final. The blue logo is surely burned into all of our minds, and I’m sure many of us would love to go back to the days of browsing the shelves of a video store to pick a film, meet other movie lovers, and actually interact with physical copies of media.
Streaming might be so much easier, but you can’t deny that it has made the art of picking and watching a film so much less communal and exciting. Who hasn’t scrolled through movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime for what feels like hours only to end up watching nothing at all?
The nostalgic charm of video stores can be seen in movies like Clerks or Scream, where characters work among the rows of new blockbuster releases and old B-movie classics. What a simpler time it would be to go back…
But when did video rental stores become a thing? It’s hard to believe that there was a time before you could watch your movie of choice at home, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the first-ever video rental store was believed to have been established.
What was the first video rental store, and where is it?
Before Blockbuster, a man named Eckhard Baum opened a shop in Kassel, Germany, which he believes to be the first of its kind. “I was the first and want to be the last, at least in Kassel,” he told First Post in 2016. “It’s the oldest in the world, even, the first in the United States didn’t open until 1977.”
Baum turned his love for cinema and discussing movies into a full-time job, pioneering a business model that proved to be the dominant mode of film consumption outside of going to a movie theatre for many years. “We have rarities that you can’t get anywhere else. Everyone has the new films. Only we have the old films,” he noted, explaining the appeal of his shop, which boasts many long-standing, dedicated customers.
Videothek is still open today, although it has since expanded to include film screenings and other events to unite film and music lovers in the city. According to the website, “In the summer of 1975, Eckard Baum opened the world’s first video store with his rental business! An entire industry was born. ‘Home entertainment’ began its triumphant advance, enabling, for the first time, a self-determined film culture within one’s own four walls. Since 2017, Christoph Langguth and Ralf Stadler, together with Randfilm eV, have continued to run the video library in the spirit of its inventor.”
Two years later, the first American video rental store opened its doors in Los Angeles, with George Atkinson founding the first Video Station shop on Wilshire Boulevard. He was certainly a pioneer, spreading the concept of watching movies at home across the United States, but it was Baum, all the way back in 1975, who became the first person in the world to set up a video rental store.
