NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Aaron Hamel and Jess Mills were tired of waiting for someone to bring back the video stores they frequented before the rise of digital media. So they did it themselves, opening Night Owl Video in the middle of Williamsburg.
The store is meant to have a vintage feel, like a blast into the ‘90s. Hamel, 35, told 1010 WINS that the authentic experience of being in a video store—like Kim’s Video or Videology—can’t be replicated digitally.
“When watching a movie meant going to a place, and picking out from a curated selection of great movies, and maybe just seeing something interesting on one of the covers and having that be how you picked what you were going to watch that night,” he said.
Night Owl Video is located at 288 Grand St. and had its grand opening on Friday, following a soft launch last week that saw a promising showing from the younger generation.
“To see so many people under 30 in the store, and looking at the used section of DVDs, and finding things that—looking at covers, and seeing interesting ones, and picking them up and bringing a big stack to the counter,” Hamel recounted.
Hamel and Mills, 39, plan to sell only movies in the beginning, in formats ranging from VHS to Betamax to the current 4K UHD titles. They hope to expand to rentals in the future, and to sell devices like DVD and VHS players.
“I don’t have a Beta, but I have all the other forms,” one Gen Z shopper told 1010 WINS on Friday. “I got ‘Being John Malkovich,’ ‘Clueless’ and this old Parker Posey movie called ‘Party Girl.’”
The shelves are lined with DVDs, Blu-Rays and old-school tube TVs playing vintage VHS tapes, amid the store’s other products that include movie memorabilia, posters, vinyl albums, pins, shirts and hats.
Hamel and Mills believe that a physical media revolution is coming for movies, building off the modern commercial success of vinyl albums. In 2023, vinyl albums outsold CDs for the first time since 1987, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America.
“Physical media for movies is in a similar place right now to where vinyl was 15 to 20 years ago, when it was starting to get popular again,” Hamel said.
The store’s slogan—“Death to Streamers! Physical Media Forever!”—embodies the owners’ criticism of streaming services, which Hamel said overwhelm consumers with prices, ads and disposable titles on platforms that have “basically reinvented cable.”
“There’s so many titles that get released, these original movies on Netflix for instance, that get no physical release, and then one day they’re just gone off of Netflix and it’s like—they might as well have never even been made in the first place,” he said. “Like, they’re gone. They’re on Netflix servers somewhere and no one will ever see them again.”
A college student attending Friday’s grand opening agreed with Hamel, saying that she overconsumes on digital platforms and prefers her DVD player, which connects to her laptop.
“I guess I am a little bit old school, because I don’t really like streaming,” she said. “I don’t know, I feel like it’s really just consuming too much at once.”
For now, Hamel and Mills—who both moved to New York City in 2012 to pursue independent film—are the store’s sole employees. They hope to levy their knowledge and expert recommendations of the collection to customers looking to reconnect with physical media.