ILV owners Conrad Bejarano & John Dorgan 

From The Austin Chronicle January 16th cover story, A Republic of Indie in a Netflix Nation: How Austin's Homegrown Video Storea are Faring Against the Big Red Giant by Marc Savlov:

It's Austin and its homegrown film-geek culture that has allowed places such as the Alamo Drafthouse, websites such as Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool News, and the two biggest indie video-rental stores in town – I Luv Video and Vulcan – to not only survive but indeed thrive while nearly everywhere else in the country the market is grinding to a standstill.

Video-rental outlets outside of Austin – and indeed all the major rental chains – appear seemingly paralyzed by an unknown future that not only includes the specter of Netflix (and its impersonal, vaguely onanistic methodology that makes the subscriber feel specifically catered to when, in fact, they're having zero interaction with anything resembling the sage old video store clerks of yore) but also the prospect of yet more online-download or streaming platforms to come. Technological advances in media delivery – to televisions, to cell phones, to iPods, to Xboxes and Wiis and PS3s – are happening at a rate that's outpacing the corporate conglomerates' ability to think straight or to plan for the future. The future, in a very real sense, is happening right now, and the metaphorical five-year plan of Blockbuster (and its ilk) has been frantically pared down to a five-month plan, a five-week plan, and, ultimately, the shuttering of many obnoxiously blue-and-yellow boxlike stores: 290 Blockbuster stores closed in 2006, nearly 300 in 2007, and dark, if unconfirmable, rumors of a Blockbuster-free world are hovering on the horizon.

Which is good news to Conrad Bejarano, co-founder of Austin's I Luv Video, the largest and most popular of Austin's independent video stores.

"Can you make sure to mention that this year is our 25th anniversary?" he asks over drinks at Spider House (which Bejarano also owns with I Luv co-founder John Dorgan, along with the neighboring EcoClean and the soon-to-be-reopened United States Art Authority).

Done.

"I was working at a video store called Sounds Easy in Phoenix in 1984," says Bejarano by way of explaining I Luv's origins, "when I came to Austin to visit my friend John, and I thought, you know, this would be the perfect town to open a store for this new trend called 'video stores.' Not long after that visit, I moved here, and John, who was a huge fan of the Clash, and I opened up London Video in Dobie Mall, which did really well, but because there was no parking and no visibility from the street, we sold it within a year.

"We immediately opened up our first I Luv Video way down on Slaughter and Manchaca, and eventually we had nine different locations all over town. Back then we were pretty mainstream as far as what we offered. We kept the culty stuff up at our Airport location. But we've learned that our store's culture isn't conducive to having stores too far south or too far north, and so we ended up consolidating into the two current stores."

I Luv Video has always been a mainstay and supporter of obscure, psychotronic fare – personally, we recall getting hipped to the short films of NYC cinema transgressors Nick Zedd and Richard Kern via I Luv way back in the late Eighties – even going so far as to add a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time pizzeria to the mix, with an I Luv Video Pizza at the original south location. (The concept – videos, pizza, and beer delivered to your house – was a natural fit for South Austin and lasted a surprising six years.)

Eventually, though, Bejarano and Dorgan realized it was their two cult cinema-centric stores – at 2915 Guadalupe and 4803 Airport – that were bringing in the most customers and developing the most repeat clientele. Sensing that any attempt to compete with then-industry titan Blockbuster for market share of mainstream video rentals was doomed for disaster ("You've got to remember that the price of VHS tapes, in the Eighties, was running anywhere from 60 to 80 bucks a tape," reminds Bejarano), the chain pared itself down to the two current locations and began to grow exponentially.

"What we decided to do was sort of groom our clientele and just get two or three copies of a mainstream VHS release – as opposed to the 50 to 100 copies a single Blockbuster would buy – and spend the rest of the money on films we wanted to watch, which were weird, underground, and generally not carried by Blockbuster – or anyone else, for that matter. And that's stayed our guiding philosophy from there on out. What's happened is that we've created a culture from scratch by adding cool movies that you can't find anywhere else, cool staff members who aren't snobs but will actively help customers find what they don't even know they're looking for, and just anticipating what our customers want."

Unlike the rest of the world, I Luv Video is doing bang-up business. "Every year it gets better and better," says Bejarano. "These last two, three years, the sales and rentals have just been amazing, because now, from a rental perspective, you buy a DVD for $16, rent it out for $4, and get it right back. It's just an amazing business."

Of course, having been in business for 25 years, I Luv Video has amassed the largest back catalog of VHS and DVD titles in town. With some 80,000 titles on hand at its Airport location alone, it's now one of the largest and most respected video/DVD rental stores in the world.

"If we were to try to open up all over again now, it just wouldn't be possible. We couldn't even find half the titles we have in stock because so many of them, especially the VHS copies, are just gone. And as far as Netflix having an impact on us? I don't see it. We have customers who have Netflix and still come into the store and browse and rent from us. Right now, we're doing better than we ever have, although 14 years ago we thought that the advent of DVDs would be the end of the video business. That's why we opened up Spider House Cafe, right next door to our Guadalupe location. John and I figured, 'Geez, in a few years our video business is going to die, so let's find an alternative.' As it turned out, the exact opposite happened: I Luv Video on Guadalupe fed into Spider House and vice versa. In a way, they're symbiotic, which is also what's going on with EcoClean and the USAA – it's all part of the same I Luv Video culture, with the same people and the same clientele interacting to one extent or another in all four places. It's a totally Austin kind of thing, I think. I'm not sure that this could have taken root and grown the way it did anywhere else."