Two emails this morning.
"Dear loyal subscribers of Videomatica.ca,
After many years of serving your movie needs, we have reluctantly decided that we must discontinue our rental by mail service...."
and
"Hello fans of Videomatica!
Videomatica Rentals is now closed except for returns, as of 10 pm Oct 30, 2011...."
So that is that. No more walking into a room where we're surrounded by movies we want to see, or hold, or read about. Alas.
A sad day. But there's comfort in the news that Cinemail will be acquiring Videomatica's movie-by-mail collection, and adding those titles to their own catalogue of titles. So even once I've viewed and returned The Island, Vision, Police Adjective and My Father My Lord - titles not available through, for example, zip.ca - there's still someplace rent them.
I'm also optimistic that the Videomatica rental collection will be preserved. In my last conversation with Graham and Brian (the VM owners), it looked likely that the dvd and videotape rental collection would be acquired by a university library - as substantiated by their ongoing “Help save the Videomatica Collection, send it to University!” campaign. One hopes that the day will come when the purchase of a university library card will provide access to those vast treasures - though the likelihood that they can be carted off and viewed at home seems questionable.
Later this week I'll check out Cinemail, and almost certainly subscribe.
"Active subscribers will have limited-time access to their Rental History and Queue lists."
So, for the record...
click to enlarge
Ron, thanks for your kind comments! Just one clarification, Cinemail.ca is not acquiring any titles from our collection.
ReplyDeleteBrian Bosworth, Videomatica
As we discussed by email, I don't think the assets Cinemail acquired include any of the actual videos. I think all of those are going to UBC, including the ones they used for their by-mail service. What Cinemail appears to have acquired is only the mailing list of subscribers, any outstanding subscription balances paid already (that's credit which we get to use if we transfer our accounts to Cinemail before our current renewal term expires), and perhaps the movie database, some physical assets (shelving, cash registers, etc.). The email explicitly said "our good friends at Cinemail.ca have acquired certain assets of Videomatica.ca, exclusive of our rental library."
ReplyDeleteFYI, they link to this post of yours from their site: http://www.videomatica.ca/fundraiser/News.htm.