VHS Rentals

Details

Location

Mallusk

Year

1984

Date

Production 26/09/1984

Length

04min 33sec

Audio

sound

Format

Betacam

colour

Source

Digitised as part of the BFI Heritage 2022 project.

Courtesy

British Film Institute, ITV, UTV Archive

Rights Holder

ITV

It is illegal to download, copy, print or otherwise utilise in any other form this material, without written consent from the copyright holder.

Description

Eamonn Holmes reports for UTV from a video warehouse in Mallusk on the edge of Belfast. This is the home of Solomon and Peres, a local video wholesaler for the burgeoning video rental libraries trade of the time. Eamonn speaks to company spokesperson, Les Patterson, about the current trends and asks if many video libraries are full of low quality movies to merely fill the shelves. He also raises the subject of adult and pornographic movies and there are shots of shelves filled with adult titles. Les assures Eamonn that he insists that libraries keep such titles on the top shelf in their premises to keep them away from children.

Eamonn asks if one day he might be able to pick up a video tape in any type of shop. Les fights back against such a notion and says that the rental shops have supported him and that he will therefore support them and try to stop other premises offering videos. It was a prescient question from Holmes because a few years later, by the end of the decade, there was a move towards the public being able to own videos rather than rent them with the price of tapes made more affordable. Les may have been prepared to take a stand on the issue but the tide of history was for people being able to purchase and own video tapes, and later DVDs, at the local supermarket or garage and even beyond that to paying to stream content on mobile devices, anywhere at any time.

Credits

An Ulster Television Production.
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