PARIS:
JM Video, one of the only two remaining DVD rental stores in Paris, is a focal point for cinema lovers and visited by actors such as Brad Pitt when they are in the city, but the growing competition of the transmission platforms means that this Paris institution is fighting for survival.
The choice is not the problem: JM Video has a library of more than 50,000 films, more than about 5,000 on offer at any time in Netflix (Nflo.x), opens new tabs and more than the catalogs of all the main combined transmission actors.
“It is one of the few places in Paris with a real films collection, you can find things here that you cannot find anywhere else,” said Virginie Breton movies, which DVD rents several times a week. But not enough to keep the JM video afloat.
Paris Property Rentals and an increasingly lower customer base, combined with the arrival of transmission services more and more like Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ are squeezing the life of the Cuevas store, where the DVDs spill from the shelves from floor to knife.
Founded in 1982, JM Video was one of the around 5,000 video rental stores in France at the end of the last century, long before Netflix changed to be a DVD rental attire to a transmission pioneer around 2010.
Now, France has only 10 DVD rental stores, two of which are in Paris. The store manager, Theo Banilhon, said JM Video is struggling to pay the rent and salaries of his three employees, and has lost about 20,000 euros ($ 24,000) in the last two years.
This month, the store launched a crowdfunding call, raising around 26,000 euros of more than 1,000 donors in less than two weeks. But he needs 35,000 euros to ensure his immediate future and 65,000 to be sure in the long term, said Banlhon.
He firmly believes in the concept of DVD rental, noting that young people in particular are interested in high quality formats. “We are a lighthouse at night that goes against the new ways to consume a certain culture. It is good that people know that there is another way to approach the cinema, not driven by algorithms,” said Banilhon.
($ 1 = 0.8445 euros)
