VideoFreeBrooklyn - The Home of Video Rentals for Enthusiasts

Why Brooklyn Still Lines Up for Video Rental

A return to browsing, not scrolling

Walk past our front window on any given evening and you will see something the streaming era was supposed to kill off for good. People are browsing. They pick up a case, read the back, set it down, and reach for something they were not looking for. That small habit is the whole reason video rental in Brooklyn has found a second life, and it is why the shop looks and feels the way it does today.

We did not set out to build a museum. We set out to give film lovers a room where the choice is yours again. Over the past few years we leaned into that idea on purpose. The shelves are arranged by mood and director instead of by what an algorithm thinks you watched last week. The lighting is warm. The staff actually argue about movies at the counter. For a lot of our regulars, renting a tape or a disc here is less about the format and more about slowing down and remembering why they fell for movies in the first place.

That nostalgic pull is real, but it is not the only draw. A video rental store in Brooklyn now works as a meeting point for people who want a recommendation from a human being rather than a thumbnail. Students, parents, collectors, and first time visitors all end up trading titles by the new arrivals wall. The past is part of the appeal, yet the conversations happening here are very much in the present.

None of this happened by accident. Video rental in Brooklyn came back because a handful of shops decided the experience was worth protecting. We kept the late fees gentle, the hours friendly, and the staff picks honest. People noticed, and they keep coming back for the kind of visit a screen at home cannot give them.

The Categories Enthusiasts Ask For First

From cult horror to foreign cinema

Spend a week behind the counter and clear patterns show up in what people hunt for. Knowing those categories is half of what keeps a video rental business healthy, so here is the honest breakdown.

Cult and horror lead the way. Worn copies of films that never got a clean digital release move faster than almost anything else, and collectors come in specifically for the titles the major platforms quietly dropped.

Foreign and arthouse cinema is the next big pull. Subtitled films, regional releases, and director box sets bring in a steady crowd who got tired of waiting for a streaming service to add something and then yank it a month later.

Classic Hollywood and noir hold their own too. Older customers rent the films they grew up on, while younger ones discover them for the first time, often after seeing a clip online and wanting the full picture.

Then there is the local and independent shelf. Brooklyn filmmakers, documentaries shot a few blocks away, and small label releases give the store a sense of place that no national catalogue can match.

Put those groups together and the picture is clear. Video rental in Brooklyn did not survive by beating streaming on convenience. It survived by offering the one thing a feed cannot: a curated room, a real person to ask, and the freedom to stumble onto a film you would never have searched for. If you have not browsed a shelf in years, treat this as your reminder of what you have been missing.

NEW YORK CITY — As Netflix and video on demand drove the final nails into the coffin of the video rental business several years ago, Wendy Chamberlain, owner of Williamsburg’s Videology, was faced with a choice: close the store for good, or find a new source of income.

She chose to stay open, overhauling the 308 Bedford Ave. shop in 2011 to add a bar and screening room. She trained some of her staff as bartenders and moved most of her inventory of 16,000 titles to the basement.

“We couldn’t just give up,” Chamberlain said. “We hated the idea of not being able to be here and rent movies to people anymore.”

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Gone are the days when rental shops abounded, feeling more frequent than supermarkets in some neighborhoods, and not just the porno video stores. No, these were local shops with lovingly curated collections and reliably well-watched staffers always busy rewatching some forgotten foreign flick in the corner, ready and able to provide their feelings on your selection with varying amount of judgement depending on the pick.

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After thirty-three years, Videorama is closing. The store, standing at the corner of Dahill Road and 18th Avenue in Borough Park, was the first in its neighborhood. It’s possibly the last place in blue-collar Brooklyn to survive almost entirely on DVD rentals and sales. Though it’s outlived several competitors, it cannot battle the lure of streaming, torrents, and an overall dwindling demand for physical media. Tommy Pittas, a Brooklyn native who took over the business following his father’s retirement, considers the store’s resilience “a labor of love.” Kept afloat by transfers of video or film to disc, he spent the last year debating whether to keep the store running much longer, finally vowing to close the doors in early March (the 7th, to be exact). “It’s not only a financial decision,” Pittas reasons, “but an emotional one.”

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