Backlot Video in Sackville closing its doors

A video rental store in Sackville is closing its doors after 13 years in business, a casualty of people's move towards getting their entertainment online.

Backlot video is selling off its 3000 videos and hundreds of TV series in a liquidation sale starting Thursday.

"We're talking about an 80 per cent drop off in revenue probably in the last year to year and a half," said owner Chris Graham.  "Once I went to see my accountant for the last year he said, you're not getting paid anymore so you need to let it go."

Graham is a movie lover, who dreamed of opening a video store long before he took the plunge in 2003.

"It says in my high school yearbook that I was going to open a video store," he said.

Business was brisk in the early years, and Graham felt ahead of the curve.

"It was good, DVD was just starting to come into its own as we knew that going in, so we went really aggressively into building a DVD library and very little in VHS and within a couple of years VHS was gone."

Netflix the final blow

He remembers employing four staff as well as making an income for himself and his wife during the heyday of video rentals. But as viewing habits changed, so did profits.

"We were able to manage it up until about a year ago when Netflix really caught on with some of the adult audiences, we lost the younger audiences years ago," Graham said.

Graham is sad to close up shop, and he feels a responsibility to the customers that stayed loyal.

"The reason I continued longer than I probably should have is because I think I felt a bit of a personal obligation to the people because it is a service, it's hard to just pull the plug on that," he explained.

But for Graham, the time to move on has come, and he expects the store to close its doors for the final time in June.

He'll miss his extensive movie collection, but he is keeping about 500 of his favourite videos