Michael L. Diamond

@mdiamondapp

BRICK - After 27 years, Bob's Video Time will close its doors Saturday, its owners admitting they had no answers left after streaming services from Netflix, Hulu and Amazon finally made their store obsolete.

Bob and Donna Karpodinis said they hung on to what is the last video rental store in Brick for as long as they could. But the holiday shopping season fizzled, continuing a painful trend that saw sales dip year after year. And they decided to pull the plug.

"We've been back and forth," said Bob Karpodinis, 62.

"I just know that the last two years (we were saying), 'We’ve got to close, we’ve got to close,' but you don’t want to because we just love it here,” Donna Karpodinis, 59, said.

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Bob's Video Time is in a small strip center on Lanes Mill Road, and its closing shouldn't be a surprise. Video chains like Blockbuster had far deeper products, and they were steamrolled by Netflix years ago. And you would need to think far outside of the box to see any kind of future for DVDs.

But it still is likely to hit hard. Gen Xers in particular grew up with video stores, spending an inordinate amount of time contorting themselves to connect their VCRs and later their DVD players to the back of the television set. They now need to admit there is a cheaper and easier way to watch movies at home.

Artists still make movies. Consumers still watch them. But "in today's world, the technology has become one that has disenfranchised local merchants that delivered that content," said Marc Kalan, a marketing professor at Rutgers Business School in Newark and New Brunswick.

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Last-minute shoppers

Customers have been flocking to Bob's Video Time since it announced it was going out of business three weeks ago.

Jenna Bruno, 20, of Brick stopped in Tuesday to buy a copy of "Finding Dory" (which she had never seen) and "Crimson Peak" (which stars one of her favorite actors, Tom Hiddleston).

Bruno, a musician, said she often prefers physical items like books and vinyl records to their digital forms. And she has a MacBook Pro that has a CD drive, allowing her to watch DVDs on her laptop. But she admits she is old-fashioned; the new MacBooks don't have a CD drive.

"I feel like its more like a personal kind of thing now," she said. "People kind of watch movies on their own now with Netflix and everything. People kind of go in their room and disappear for a few hours and watch movies."

The question might be how did Bob's Video Time survive for this long?

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Rise and fall

They owned a gift store on the Asbury Park boardwalk until 1990, when they decided to buy what was then called Video Time. They couldn't lose. Consumers were installing VCRs, which allowed them to rent movies after they were released in the theater at home.

Business was brisk. The Karpodinises expanded the Brick store in 1995. They added a second store in Howell. And when chains such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video proliferated, they held their ground. When VHS tapes gave way to better quality DVDs, the Karpodinises sold and rented DVDs instead. When eBay introduced an auction site on the internet, they sold and rented online. They survived Netflix's mail-order rental service. They survived Redbox, which set up kiosks outside of dozens supermarkets and rented DVDs for as little as $1.50 a day.

"We were the family," Donna Karpodinis said. "We were the hometown video family. They trust us. And great customer service. You didn’t get that everywhere. And Redbox, they don’t have customer service. There’s nobody there but a box. You can't go in and talk to anyone.”

It didn't last. They closed the Howell store eight years ago. Then a new generation of consumers raised on the internet took over. They stream movies through Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and Hulu from their couch. They no longer need to get in the car to rent a movie. They no longer need to worry that the video store won't have a popular movie in stock. They no longer need to worry about late fees.

Revenue from streaming services is expected to soar from $5 billion in 2011 to $15.4 billion this year, before rising to $18.8 billion in 2020. By comparison, revenue from physical home videos is expected to plummet from $15.6 billion in 2011 to $8.2 billion this year, to $5.6 billion in 2020, according to PwC's Global Media Outlook 2016-2020.

The result: The number of nonkiosk video outlets has fallen from 17,638 at the end of 2008 to 4,445 at the end of 2015, according to the Entertainment Merchants Association, a trade group.

The Asbury Park Press found one other video rental store at the Shore: The Video Shop on Main Street in Belmar has been open since 1983, hanging on thanks to its relatively low rent, owner John Distaulo Jr. said.

"Family video stores are slim to none," Distaulo said.

"Video stores no longer service a need that’s significant," Rutgers' Kalan said. "I would commend whoever ran the Brick store that they outlasted virtually (everyone else)."

The Karpodinises, who live in Brick, have two children, Alex, 32, and Marie, 28, who are scientists.The couple said revenue at Bob's Video Time has fallen to about one-sixth of what it was during its peak in 2000, each year less than the previous one. They began talking about closing a couple of years ago and then made up their minds after the holidays.

They plan to keep working, selling DVDs online. And who knows. Maybe one day, nostalgia-driven consumers will do for video tapes what they did for vinyl records and resuscitate an industry that was written off.

"A lot of people have been asking us about VHS, if we sell VHS," Bob Karpondinisis said. "We haven’t sold VHS for years, so you never know.”

Michael L. Diamond; 732-643-4038; mdiamond@gannettnj.com