Previous editions of RePlay ReView can be found here
Unless you lived it, I think it’s really hard to understand just how bizarre the video rental landscape was in the mid-1980s.
According to a 1985 article in The Free Lance-Star newspaper, there were about 15,000 dedicated video rental stores in the United States at the time, bringing in an estimated $1.2 billion in sales, up from only $200 million in 1980. By 1988, a New York Times article notes that there were 25,000 dedicated rental stores across the country, vying for a piece of a $6 billion industry. The industry was growing so quickly that Blockbuster Video had 19 locations in 1987; by November 1988, there were 200 stores, with a new location opening about every 40 hours. At the company’s peak, a new Blockbuster was opening every 24 hours.
But, as most of us old folks recall, you didn’t have to go to a dedicated video store to get your movie fix. In that New York Times article, they mention that there were about 45,000 non-dedicated places to rent videos, too. It wasn’t unusual to find a rack or two of tapes at your local convenience store, grocery store, or drug store.
For example, in the small town I grew up in, we never had a dedicated store, but there were two places to rent videos in the 1980s – one was a short-lived ice cream parlor that had a small wall of tapes and the other was in a store whose primary business was selling appliances like refrigerators and stoves (to further the oh-so-1980s-ness of it all, that same store had tanning booths in the back). In a show of small town friendliness, if one place didn’t have the movie you wanted they were happy to call up the other place and ask them to reserve it for you until you could make the trek across town on your bike.
It made sense that a store might want to get in on the growing video rental business and, thankfully, there were some VHS vending machine options available in this 1987 issue of RePlay Magazine…
VIDEO VENDOR
We’re going to start with the most well-known video rental machine, Video Vendor. The RePlay blurb isn’t very helpful – “machine that vends video tapes for rental” – and barely scratches the surface of how the Video Vendor worked.
As you can see, the Video Vendor was a monster of a machine. It stands about six-feet tall, eight-feet wide, two-feet deep, and, according to those who have worked with them, weighed about 800 pounds before stocking it with video tapes. This was no little wire rack of tapes – this was a fully automated video rental store.
The Video Vendor was released in 1984 by Essex Engineering out of Essex, Connecticut. A New York Times article from the time reports that there were only a handful of machines in a few test markets, like Burlington, Vermont; Detroit, Michigan; Oakland, California; and, specifically, Doan’s Pharmacy in Centerpoint, Connecticut. These first few Video Vendor machines only held 18 titles, but by the time the machine went to a wider market, the capacity had reached 320 VHS tapes. Rentals were typically $4 – $6 for two days, but the owner of the machine could set whatever price they wanted.
Renting came in two different styles – by either using a credit card or a membership card.
If you had a membership card, it worked a lot like a Dave & Busters card – you could pay a cashier to add money to your account that you could then use to rent videos. You also had the option of inserting money or swiping a credit card after swiping your membership card. Either way, there was a record of your transaction associated with your membership account and any applicable late fees could be paid the next time you rented, with the credit card you used, or charged to your pre-paid account balance. Membership accounts could be protected with a PIN so no one could find your lost card and rent a bunch of movies in your name. There were also limitations on credit card transactions to three rentals per day to ensure someone didn’t clean out the machine by renting movies on a credit card they found lying on the sidewalk.
If the machine’s owner used the membership method, they could also set up rating restrictions on rentals. This meant they could offer rated R and even adult movies, but the account could be locked down at the customer’s request so that kids couldn’t rent anything too risqué.
If no membership was required, you simply swiped a credit card and your fees were applied to the card. The Vendor was set up with a phone line that would call out to a central database to check if a card was stolen, counterfeit, or expired, and would be rejected if it didn’t pass the test. This process only took a few seconds, so the user barely noticed.
The movies were stored in numbered slots, spine out, so you could see the title. Once you decided what to rent, just punch in the slot number and a computerized arm with a clamp on the end moved to the slot and grabbed the tape. It brought the tape to a box on the front covered by a plastic safety shield that you lifted in order to retrieve your tape. A receipt printed out and you were good to go! The whole process took about 45 seconds.
To return a tape, you simply put it back in the box, a scanner on the machine read a special barcode, and returned the tape to the appropriate slot. If you decided to keep the tape, you would simply not return it. The owner could set up the amount of time they wanted to wait before the purchase price would be charged to your credit card or to your membership account. The machine could also be configured to allow purchases immediately if you just knew you just had to have the latest blockbuster for your home video collection.
And the Video Vendor wasn’t restricted to just videos. One suggestion from a Video Vendor flier was setting up the machine for one-time purchases of blank tapes, VCR head cleaners, or even replacing the VHS tapes with computer disks. If the machine was still in use in 1986, I’m sure you could have easily swapped out tapes for Nintendo games, too.
In a 1987 Washington Post article, it’s reported that there were 800 Video Vendor machines in use across the country. However, that level of success didn’t last forever. A letter on the Internet Archive dated December 3, 1990 gives notice to all their clients that the company would cease operations on January 1, 1991.
If you’d like to see a Video Vendor in action, arcade collector and restorer Mark Shields found one in Ohio and set about restoring it to working order (I believe all of the photos from this post are his). Here are a couple of TikTok videos from his account showing how to rent and return a movie.
(Click the videos to turn on the sound and control playback)
AMERICAN MOVIE MACHINE
There isn’t much information available about the American Movie Machine. In fact, this blurb from RePlay has just as much information as any news articles from the time that I could find online.
According to a 1986 article in RPM Weekly, a Canadian music industry magazine, The American Movie Machine was created by Maurits De Prins, who also owned Super Club, the largest video rental company in Belgium. Used throughout Europe at the time, where the machine was called the much more charming “Mr. Video”, the company began to expand its reach to North America by installing 20 units in Safeway grocery stores in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. The machine had a nearly 400 tape capacity, as well as up to 18 VCRs that were available to rent.
It’s difficult to understand how the Movie Machine actually worked. If you look at the photo in RePlay, it looks similar to the Video Vendor, with a case full of tapes and a keypad and monitor interface. However, in a Washington Post article from 1987, the Vice President of Movie Machine, Paul Pollinger, “scoffs at Video Vendor’s patented robotic arm”. He says, “We have a robotic arm, too; it’s attached to our customer and God put it there.”
So, I’m just guessing here, but maybe there was a clamp that would secure the tape in the case until a member punched in that tape’s slot number. They could then slide open the case and retrieve their movie.
Alternatively, swiping a membership card could have unlocked the case and the customer simply took them off the shelf or retrieved a VCR (those dark boxes on the bottom row look like padded hard cases that rental VCRs used to be packed in). This could have triggered a sensor in the machine that slot number 123 was now empty and that would register as a rental on your account.
However it worked, once you made your rental choices, a receipt would print out and you would take your movies and receipt to the checkout aisle – along with any groceries you might have – to pay the attendant there.
Aside from that 1987 Washington Post article, I couldn’t find any more information about The American Movie Machine. However, I did find a brief video from 1989 about The Amazing Movie Machine, 155 of which had been installed across Toronto, Canada with aspirations to have 400 running by the end of the year. I’m wondering if “American” might have been rebranded as “Amazing” for the Canadian market to de-Americanize it. But if they are related, the Amazing machine was quite an upgrade from the American version.
Here’s a link to the 30 second video if you want to see it in action:
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.4771964
As you can see, users inserted a credit card card and, instead of punching in a number like the Video Vendor, they simply pushed a button that had the movie poster of the film they wanted to rent, like Red Heat, for example.
A few seconds later, the video popped out of the machine. Returning the movie was easy – just take it to any Amazing Movie Machine location. Personally, I love seeing those rows and rows of poster buttons that vend out tapes like a Pepsi machine.
VIDEOMAX
The most mysterious video vending machine in this issue of RePlay, the Videomax, essentially doesn’t seem to have existed beyond this issue of RePlay Magazine. I couldn’t find any mention of this thing online. So, the only information we have is from the blurb – that it offered a 501-title library of films and accepted credit cards for payment. From the photograph in the magazine, it looks like you made your rental choice based only on the title of the film and it spit the tape out the front. It sounds a lot like the 1989 Amazing Movie Machine in that regard, but lacking the fun of all those movie poster buttons. If anyone has any information on the Videomax, I’d love to hear it.
Cool 1980s logo, by the way.
VIDEO GRAM
Unlike the other machines in this post, the Video Gram didn’t rent out videotapes, it allowed you to make your own videotapes! Unfortunately, there’s no additional information about these machines online, so we really just have the RePlay blurb to go off of. But from the sounds of it, you bought a blank tape and a token from an attendant, which gave you 5 minutes or 10 minutes of time to produce your own video. You could control the camera with a joystick to pan and scan, as well as buttons to let you zoom in and out or even pause so you can practice before you record the next segment.
I could see this being really handy for people who wanted to be actors to produce a quick audition reel or maybe even for people to record a video to send to relatives in the era before Zoom calls. And, depending upon how expensive the whole process was, it would have been fun to do with a bunch of friends on a day out at the mall; sort of the video equivalent of a photo booth.
Either way, these machines clearly weren’t a big hit as they seemed to have vanished from our collective memory.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I’m not really surprised that none of these videotape vending machines didn’t work out in the 1980s. One has to assume the overhead costs of producing the machines was a contributing factor – between the custom enclosures, all the electronics, and continuous software development, the profit margins must have been thin.
I could also see the expense of running one of these machines being a factor as well. In 1985, the home video business was growing, but the cost of doing business was in a state of flux. Movie studios were concerned about home video stealing some of their profits, so they charged upwards of $80 to $100 for a VHS or Betamax tape of a film. Video rental stores were able to recoup this cost by charging their customers a couple of bucks a day to rent that video, but there was always a risk that if the movie wasn’t a hit, you might never make your money back.
However, this practice was starting to change in the mid-80s, starting with the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1983, which had a retail price of $39.95. Two years later, in a September 1985 article in the New York Times, the writer notes that the hit film Beverly Hills Cop was going to be released on home video on October 30th for a retail price of $29.95. However, Ghostbusters, which was to be released the next day on October 31st, was still going to be sold for the traditional price of $79.95. The cost of doing business just wasn’t predictable at all as a video rental vendor.
And even if you were lucky enough to get your tapes for $29.95, you’d be looking at $9,584 just to fill the Video Vendor’s 320 slots – and that’s the smallest inventory of the three machines! It would have cost $11,980 to fill The Amazing Movie Machine’s 400 slots, plus another $5,400 if you bought 18 VCRs at the going rate of $300 in 1985. The Videomax? A whopping $15,004.95 to fill with 501 titles! This expense doesn’t even include the fees to buy or lease the vending machine itself, the cost of refreshing your inventory with the latest releases, nor the cost to replace videos that wear out or are mishandled by customers.
For an investment of this size, you better make darn sure that machine is going to be a success. But with so much competition with everything from Blockbuster to your local bodega renting tapes, I can imagine a video vending machine was a scary prospect for many entrepreneurs. Depending upon the market, it might have been just as cost effective to open a brick-and-mortar store instead.
All that being said, it could also be argued that the video vending machine was a case of the right idea at the wrong time. 15 years later, RedBox machines could be found at drug stores, gas stations, and McDonald’s locations nationwide. RedBox had a lot of advantages that earlier video vending machines just didn’t have – virtually indestructible DVDs, the lower purchase price of inventory, smaller inventories (a maximum of 200 discs) that were easier to manage, and convenience for customers who could return their movies at any of the 34,000 kiosks that operated during the company’s peak. But if you look at how the machines operated, they’re virtually the same as these video vending pioneers from 1987.
Next time on RePlay Review, we’ll take a look at novelty machines that you might have found at your local arcade, pizza joint, or seedy gas station bathroom back in 1987.
