If you haven’t heard of John Mulaney, then I’m sorry, because you won’t care about the beginning of this column.
In his recent Comedy Central special, “New In Town,” he talks about how people mistook him for a woman thanks to his voice when he was a kid. He had a voice “like a little flute,” he said.
“I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video,” Mulaney said, “which is a very old-fashioned sentence.”
When was the last time you went into a physical building that housed a Blockbuster?
It seems like, thanks to the Internet, there is a much smaller need for physical copies of movies.
If a movie isn’t on Netflix Instant or Hulu, then we are much less likely to hunt down a physical copy — unless it’s for a class and you have to search through the library. But even that feels like a scary hassle.
It feels weird to let an entire industry become obsolete because of convenience.
What’ll happen to libraries and bookstores once e-readers and tablets become overwhelmingly popular? To be fair, libraries will most likely be around for quite a while because they cost no money to use or join, which a lot of people really appreciate.
It seems like Netflix is about to get more competition, and Blockbuster is about to get more dirt thrown on its grave.
Redbox Instant. The company has devised a way to stream video to mobile devices as well as offer low-cost DVD rentals for what appears to be less than Netflix’s price. It could launch at some point later this month.
Is this a good thing? Does Netflix deserve competition in the streaming and video rental world? Probably. There should be as few monopolies as possible. The more monopolies we have, the less fair society becomes. However, there should be competition only when we need it.
How many video streaming or renting companies do we require?
Let’s take Blockbuster, for example. It is a relic of a more simple time, but it also became sad and absolutely useless. There was no way to modernize the company to keep up with the changing times. Children will grow up without knowing that entire stores were dedicated to renting videos.
Instead, now they’ll only know about tiny booths that dispense movies or websites that stream classics onto their mobile devices and computers.
Are we losing the physical world bit by bit? Are we heading too fast into a less nostalgic world? Does it matter?
We like a lot of things because they are convenient. Take a look down the main street or highway in a town, and you’ll see the neon signs of America’s fast-food worship. Observe a line in Starbucks, and try to guess how irritated people are if they have to wait just a couple minutes to move through it.
We should slow down and appreciate the smaller things in life, even if it takes a moment.
But Lord knows, if our video takes too long to buffer and load, we will get upset real quick.
