Now? The video rental store is dead. And the idea of ‘renting’ a film, and having to return it to the store – by hand! – is positively archaic.

Yet for some time, the film industry was petrified about surrendering the comfort blanket of the rental window. It took the advent of DVD to change things around, but even then, many were fraught at the thought of rentals going. “I can’t believe that the heads of the major motion picture studios would be so stupid as to destroy the rental windows,” thundered Steven Jefferies, who owned the VidBiz chain of video shops in London, back at the end of the 90s. Quoted in Billboard, he said that “home video still accounts for 48% of all movie profits.” Not everyone agreed: Tower Records (remember them?) video manager Tara Gordon argued that a possible DVD rental window would be “suicidal when you are just launching a format.” Some still tried, mind.

But then DVD changed everything. By the time the format first started to gain traction with consumers in 1997, movie studios themselves were split as to which way to go – rent or straight to retail – yet alone the video stores themselves. Some, such as Warner Bros, were heavily committed to DVD, and to releasing all of their titles ‘day and date’ to sell through on the format. That is, they’d release films on DVD on the same day as the VHS version, at an affordable price.

Others were more cautious (Disney, for one, notably hedged its bets on DVD for a while, before eventually embracing the format). So cautious, in fact, that there was a DVD rival format, that’d keep the idea of a rental window in place.

That format was DIVX. Not the digital video codec – that’s DivX – rather an alternative, disc-based video rental system that was launching at the same time as DVD. The reason for its being? Because the VHS market was a known, reliable money-spinner for studios. They knew that, around six months after the cinema release of a film, they could release it on video to rent, charging video shops up to £90 for a tape. Then, a few months on, they could charge £10-13 for a version to buy, the key difference being generally fewer adverts (save for an infamous VHS release of RoboCop from Virgin Video, with half an hour of ads before the feature), and a smaller box. It all extended the financial life span of a film, and was a golden goose that many were wary of slaying.