Gimmie Friction

More and more often I find myself cross-referencing my 6 streaming accounts to find something to watch and turn up nothing. There are three different types of nothing:

1. Poorly Organized Void: there are endless choices badly organized by vibey categories that are frustrating to navigate.

2. Memory Lapse: the media in question has never been uploaded to the service because the Corporate Greedlord decided it wasn’t profitable enough to keep on a server. The movie will inevitably be a classic but, because it was released prior to the 80s, might as well not exist.

3. MIA: the media in question was available, but thanks to a cascading failure of rights managment it’s been pulled from the service you subscribe to. It’s now only available on an entirely different service, which requires its own subscription.

Despite those frustrations, who would want to go back to the old way? Who has the energy to leave the house and visit a video rental store, where you would have to interact with real people and make real choices: Charlie’s Angels or Chocolat? Streaming services promise a frictionless experience with infinite choice and minimal effort. Smoothing your consumption via a glossy app ensures you don’t hit any bumps that might alert you to the actual cost of using the technology: all your preferences and patterns distilled into an advertising profile that can be used against you.

The Old Way, for those of you who never experienced the pleasure of walking into a suburban Blockbuster Video circa 1999, involved travelling to a video rental store and choosing from the store’s selection. First it was VHS tapes, then DVD rentals. Some places even had games! You could buy snacks at the register, get your customer loyalty card punched, and head back to your house for movie night with your 7 best friends. Movie rental joints could be intensely local places (RIP Casablanca Video) or prime chain retail, like Blockbuster. They flourished for years before Netflix smothered them with the ability to access virtually any title without leaving the house.

Movie rental stores were also riddled with advertising, but walking into a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jar Jar Binks was part of the deal. You were going to a place to purchase something. You were opting into the marketing experience. But you did not rent Titanic and then receive a phone call from the video store staff a day later asking if you might also be interested in PFDs, cubic zirconium Heart of the Ocean necklaces, or pregnancy tests. It was a closed loop.

I would gladly endure the friction of the old movie rental shop experience if it meant I didn’t have to sell my entire consumer history to a nameless third party while the people who made those films are also screwed out of their residuals. Home video rentals and physical media sales used to form a huge part of the compensation for people who worked on movies and TV. It’s a model that streaming has gutted. In exchange for infinite content, we have access to a shrinking assortment of creative work on a given platform and burn hundreds of dollars a year on underused subscriptions because we wanted to watch that one show on Paramount+ one time. Trading a bit of my time to avoid that nonsense AND get a chance to find a new favourite movie seems like a good deal to me.

What I’m saying is: I think we’ve reached the point in the nostalgia and frustration cycle that if someone opened a pop-up movie rental shop in 2025 it would be a hit. Take a neglected storefront in a suburban strip mall and go all out with the late 90s/early 2000s props and set up an honest to goodness video rental store. Get that Jar Jar Binks cardboard cutout from the garage and put it out front next to the scale model of the Millennium Falcon. Stock the cooler with Pepsi Blue. Give people a punch card where after 8 movie rentals they get a signed photograph of Tom Hanks. Mood-ring clad hand on boyband loving heart, I think it would make a mint.

Give me that friction. I can use the heat to make popcorn.