Nov. 18, 1987: Edmonton video rentals are big business

Video stores? They seemed to be everywhere back in the 1980s.

There were video stores open 24 hours, adults-only video stores, 99-cent video rentals and import shops with videos in Spanish and Italian.

Edmonton's phone book, if you remember those, listed 125 video rental shops, in addition to all the convenience stores that also rented out movies.

In Alberta in 1987, more VCRs were purchased per capita than anywhere else in the country — a main reason video rental stores were such a success.

One of the bigger chains, Video Spot, boasted having 5,500 movies in one location. That kind of selection made it difficult for smaller independent stores to turn a profit.

Sherwood Park was home to a standalone video store, Wilky's Video Mart, owned and operated by former Edmonton Eskimos players Tom Wilkinson and Dave Cutler.

"We're certainly not making any money out of it at this point," said Wilkinson, one of the most successful quarterbacks in Canadian Football League history. (Cutler, a placekicker, enjoyed a 16-year Eskimos career.)

"If the big company is wrong and we're here for six months or a couple years, we might be at a break even point."

Wilky's Video Mart catered to the families of Sherwood Park by keeping a large selection of kids' movies in stock.

In the 30 years since then, VHS tapes made way for DVDs, then Netflix came along to replace nearly all the video rental stores by streaming movies and TV show directly to customers' homes.

In the video, CBC's Colin MacLean takes a tour of Edmonton's hot video rental market featuring some long-gone havens for movie buffs.