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Cologne (dpa) – The customer is horrified. "Thirty years – and now you close?", Asks in the late 1940s the employee of a video store in Cologne. She nods without saying a word. The customer goes down the shelves, each DVD costs one euro – not per rental day, but per purchase.
The balance will be sold, the video store is about to close – after three decades of loan activity. Agitated, the long-time customer runs a monologue. "If we stream only today, it's not like before," he said, shaking his head. "Here on the shelves? Old DVD, nobody borrows."
The example of the lending branch of Cologne-based Videotaxi is not an isolated case: nationally, a video store is closing, and structural change is accelerating. The companies themselves are holding back with explanations – Videotaxi indicates that no questions can be answered at this time. Video World is also not available on request. The restraint of the companies is understandable. What should they say – that they have against the competition of online services such as Amazon Prime, Netflix or iTunes no longer have any chance and seem to have fallen behind?
The total figures for the sector are provided by the Association of Video and Media Specialists in Germany (IVD). The downward trend is rapid: the number of customers has increased from 4.8 million to 2.6 million between 2015 and 2017, and the rental of feature films has decreased by more than half, from 68 to 31 million per year .
Although prices have risen slightly, but the decline in revenue could not be stopped: if the video stores in this country in 2015 with the feature film rental revenues of 165 million euros, it was 2017 only 84 million euros. The number of video libraries, on the other hand, has increased from around 900 to 600 between 2016 and 2017. In other words, one in three rental stations is closed in one year. Ten years ago, he was still around 3000.
The industrial badociation IVD considers above all that piracy is at the root of the harm that companies do: it does too little against illegal downloads and criticism on the Internet. "Without a stronger fight against piracy, it will not come back," complains Jörg Weinrich, general manager of the IVD.
Other experts, on the other hand, believe that competition on the Internet is the main reason for this decline. Florian Kerkau of Goldmedia's strategy consulting firm says that online vendors have lost their reason to be in the market. "The commercial model of the video store is that of individuals – instead of going to a store, borrow a DVD and come back later, just a few clicks today."
Hermann-Dieter Schröder of the Hans Bredow Institute of the University of Hamburg sees it in the same way. "Video stores are being replaced by online services," he said. Previously, its advantage was that consumers could choose the time of a filmichtung itself, regardless of the TV program. "Thanks to the Internet, this has become obvious." And the prospects? "Stay in the dark," says expert Kerkau. "The video rental market will sink into insignificance." According to Schröder, in 10 years, the number of video libraries in Germany will tend to be zero. "The industry is dying."
An owner of a video library then declared: Silvio Neubauer is installing a demanding artistic program in his Berlin film gallery and has made a name for it. But this has not spared the decline – since 2008, sales have dropped 70%. "Without a drastic reduction in space and staff costs and a level of self-exploitation upset, we […] no longer exist, "says Neubauer.
He wrinkles his nose during the streaming competition, which is "very low chest". Their "high-level commercial offer of algorithms" was bad for the cultural offer – "with long-term damage difficult to estimate in the field of education". 27,000 titles are part of the Filmgalerie's media collection, which Neubauer intends to hold in the future. But how He calls the State: According to him, video libraries are extremely important for an independent cultural offer, because their models of preservation promotion could be "maybe the only way out".
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