A video rental shop/store is a physical retail business that rents home videos such as movies, prerecorded TV shows, video game cartridges/discs and other media content. Typically, a rental shop conducts business with customers under conditions and terms agreed upon in a rental agreement or contract, which may be implied, explicit, or written. Many video rental stores also sell previously viewed movies and/or new, unopened movies.
In the 1980s, video rental stores rented VHS and Betamax tapes of movies; however, most stores dropped Betamax tapes when VHS won the format war late in the decade. In the 2000s, video rental stores began renting DVDs, a digital format with higher resolution than VHS. In the late 2000s, stores began selling and renting Blu-ray discs, a format that supports high definition resolution.
