Surely this is not going to be a big cry-fest. Invisible hand of capitalism is magic, people. This is like a holy animal sacrifice to Jebus Christ, who invented capitalism.

Yeah, one can stream, and watch a thing as many times as one wants (when/where available). BUT but dvd libraries allow: movie makers' (and sometime critics') oftimes most-Insightful comments -- plus slo-mo.

and the Planet spins....

Will Kshama step in and crusade for historical status of this place to keep it open?

I remember Fremont and 44th before the building that houses Fremont Video Isle was there. The building to the north looks like a house. It was originally on Fremont. They picked it up and turned it 90 degrees. Then they built the apartment complex south of it where Video Isle is. Years later they added on to it on to the old house. Surprised it even survived. It is most recently the Pot Shop.

No article on Naked City closing down due to the building being bought out from under them? Seriously, they must've had a significantly larger impact on the Seattle community than this video store. Not to mention the fact that it'll likely be replaced with more aparentments.

Totally unfortunate, but hardly surprising. Local libraries still offer a great selection and at an unbeatable price (unless you're a moron like myself who somehow manages to rack up late fines pretty much every time you borrow something, despite living a short walk from a local branch.)

In curious opposition to the theory of the "Long Tail", where thinky-people thought that the Internet's low cost of storage would allow online purveyors of things like music & video to be able to host EVERYTHING, including all the tiny, fringe-interest fare... that has not happened.

It turns out that only Scarecrow Video has the "long tail" and freaky fringey small time stuff.
E.G.: Netflix does not have "Toxic Avenger", but Scarecrow does. Netflix has not even heard of the film "The Colour Out of Space" (a Lovecraft story), but Scarecrow has it. Netflix even dropped "30 Rock" from it's catalog. Why?
Spotify/Pandora/et.al. does not have 93 Current 93, or Pink Industry, or SPK, or The Bolshoi, or any weirdo bands like that... but I can get them at Wall of Sound.

ETC!

Capitalism fails us.

@7 I agree with you, and here is where we see the difference in models: a streaming business has to lease content where a hard-copy rental service merely has to own a physical copy. The latter a curated collection while the former is basically just a high-tech
TV station. I doubt we'll ever get the best of both worlds.

Yeah, interesting and unfortunate economics.

Besides the fact that copyright holders prefer to lease rather than sell perpetually streaming rights (and have the ability to), there's a technical issue. For tape rental, scaling from a single tape to 100 simultaneous rentals costs 100x. For streaming, once you can stream a movie at all, you can scale it to more people for sub-linear cost. It favors popular movies.

Though I have to wonder how much of the video store's tail is bootlegged or semi-bootlegged, i.e. a legit copy to own but not the $200 version the studio approves for rental. Those "rented twice a year" titles don't seem to make sense at that price to enter -- that's a ten or twenty year payback of the purchase price.

Actually I don't know if the movie owners had legal force behind that two-tier pricing. Anybody know? If they didn't then we can understand the effects of the new regime closing that off.

Maybe they'll open a buggy whip store in its place?

@11
There's one of those at 13th and Pike

@7: "The market does not pander to my individual needs over the needs of the masses!!! Capitalism has failed!!!"