GreenCine

» see greencine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mail rental was a postal arrangement before it was an internet business, which is most of the reason it never reached me. You needed a flat monthly fee on one side and a national post office willing to move millions of prepaid envelopes cheaply and on schedule on the other. The United States had the second half of that. Turkey did not, so the entire category arrived here as something you read about rather than something you could sign up for.

GreenCine launched in 1999 out of San Francisco, started by Dennis Woo as a side project inside eLine, a Bay Area technology company he had co-founded. The shape was the same as Netflix: a flat subscription with discs going back and forth in the mail and no late fee for keeping one too long. The difference was the catalog. GreenCine went after anime and the independent imports that a mainstream rental service treats as dead inventory, and it built a distribution center in Van Nuys to push them out.

By the middle of the 2000s it was carrying more than thirty thousand discs and over nine thousand titles you could watch without waiting for the mail. That is the part worth pausing on. It was offering video on demand and funding its own productions roughly a decade before the companies that get credit for both. It also put one percent of profits into independent filmmaking and ran a separate adult site called BlueCine on the side, which is how a specialty rental business actually pays for itself.

On 2 February 2015 the company's Facebook page carried a message saying the business had closed. There was no acquisition to announce and no bankruptcy anyone wrote up. Sixteen years of a specialty catalog ended in a social media post, which is a quieter exit than most of the companies it outlasted got.

~ the record ~

~ what was on the shelf ~

The argument for GreenCine was never price and never speed. It was that Netflix optimized its catalog for the middle of the audience, and a rental company optimized for the middle will not stock a 1972 Japanese film that four hundred people a year want to see. GreenCine stocked it. That is a small business by definition, because the audience for everything nobody else carries is the sum of a few thousand tiny audiences.

Anime is the piece that mattered most. In the years before licensed anime streaming existed in any legal form, a US subscriber who wanted a full series on disc had two options, and one of them was a store that did not know what it had. The other was this.

~ the blog that outgrew the store ~

GreenCine Daily started in 2003 as the company's film blog, edited by David Hudson from his home in Berlin while the company sat in San Francisco. Hudson's description of it is the best short definition of link aggregation anyone wrote in that decade: not a blog people come to read about movies, a blog people come to find out where to read about movies.

It became one of the centers of the online film conversation, cited in Film Comment and Cineaste, and it belonged to a DVD rental company that most of its readers never subscribed to. Hudson edited it until 31 December 2008, then took the same format to the Independent Film Channel and later to MUBI, where it still runs under a different name. Aaron Hillis took over on 1 January 2009 and turned it toward original writing. The blog went dark in February 2015 alongside the store that had been paying for it since 2003.

~ the day it died ~

Netflix kept its own red envelope operation running for another eight and a half years after GreenCine stopped, closing it on 29 September 2023 with a press cycle and a farewell. The difference is scale, not judgment. A general catalog can be run down slowly as a legacy line inside a larger business. A specialty catalog has no larger business to sit inside, so when the postal economics stop working it simply stops.

What actually got buried was curation with inventory behind it. Somebody had to decide which thirty thousand discs to buy and store, and that decision was the product. Recommendation engines replaced the decision without replacing the buying, which is why the long tail on modern services is deep in theory and shallow in the only way that counts.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »