Abu Dhabi: In the age of internet downloads and online streaming, a handful of stores across the capital stand as testament to a bygone era, when video rentals and audio cassettes represented the primary form of entertainment for residents.
The stores still cater to a loyal customer base but its size is rapidly dwindling, owners told Gulf News.
“Some families still prefer to rent their movies and come to us for the latest releases even now. We continue to cater to them, even though it is hard to forget just how busy we once used to be,” Mustafa Kamal, owner of Blue Diamond video, told Gulf News.
The Blue Diamond store in the Madinat Zayed area is one of two remaining rental outlets in the capital.
“We first opened in 1986 and, in its heyday, we had seven branches across the city, and at least five people working in each. Each branch had about 1,500 members, who would rent movies on video cassettes, and later on video CDs. Now, there is just this one remaining branch and I am the sole employee and owner,” Kamal, who hails from India, recounts.
The store still has about 700 members, but few come by to take home a movie.
“Most of our customers are Indian, and they like to watch Hindi movies, or rent children’s cartoons. But these are now available on DVDs and Blu-ray discs,” Kamal said.
Membership fees have remained Dh100 since the late 1990s, which gives each customer access to 20 DVDs or five Blu-ray discs. Blue Diamond still stocks about 7,500 titles in English and Hindi, with multiple copies of each title.
“The summer is an especially lean period, and we see very few young customers. With the popularisation of the internet and its services, especially after 2010, things changed from how they used to be. There were hundreds of video rental stores and we almost never saw this coming,” Kamal said.
The Copyright Co is the other video rental outlet, located in Abu Dhabi’s Khalidiyah area. It opened its doors in 1992, and used to see about 100 customers visiting daily in the 1990s.
Ashraf Assaf, its general manager, said the store still has about 3,000 DVD and Blu-ray titles.
“These days, we hardly see one customer a day who wants to rent. So we’ve branched out. We are now an official distributor for comic book merchandise from the United States-based publishers, DC Comics and Marvel Comics,” Assaf said.
Audio cassettes
Apart from these video rental outlets, two shops still sell audio cassettes, and owners say firmly that there are still customers for the old tapes.
“There are people in the Western Region with old model cars that have tape decks. They know where my shop is located, and come to buy audio cassettes,” said Abdul Hamid, owner of Al Balad Audio Cassettes.
The shop is the only one of its kind in the Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre, and it stocks pop singer albums on audio tapes alongside classics by Umm Kalthoum and Fayrouz. There are also a handful of English albums on tape. An entire wall in the store features these remaining cassettes for sale.
“We used to have two stores in Abu Dhabi’s old souq, with 100,000 titles. Now we have 10,000 cassettes in stock, but I stopped buying any more about two years ago. I doubt that there are any more distributors of original music cassettes in the UAE,” Abdul Hamid said.
The shop still sells about 100 cassettes a month, each priced at Dh10. It also stocks audio CDS, movie DVDs and Blue-ray discs, for which there are many takers.
“Once our remaining stocks are over, we won’t be selling any more cassettes,” he said.
Khalid Ahmad Obaid, technical director at Andalib Recording, the other Abu Dhabi outlet that sells music cassettes, said the gradual phase out of tape decks in cars greatly affected sales.
“Our customers are always older people looking for classical music, who are OK with the limited playback time of cassette tapes and have time to browse and think about their choices. The younger generation has no time for this cumbersome technology, and often we have domestic help stopping by to pick up a purchase,” he said.
The store is located off Sultan Bin Zayed the First Street in Abu Dhabi.
