Andre Blay

 ( 1937 Births ) 

In 1969, Blay founded an audio/video production and duplication company called Magnetic Video, which produced a series of industrial films and tapes for various corporations in the early 1970s. In 1976, shortly after Sony introduced its Betamax videocassette recorder, Blay flew to Hollywood, where he asked various studio executives if they could allow him to make videocassettes of the films they released. Only one company responded with an offer: 20th Century-Fox, which licensed 50 of its pre-1972 feature films to Magnetic. The deal proved successful, and led to Blay making similar duplication and distribution deals for films owned by Viacom, the estate of silent screen comedian Charlie Chaplin, wildlife filmmaker Bill Burrud, ABC Pictures, and ITC Entertainment. In 1980, he wooed United Artists out of a preexisting deal with VidAmerica with a $43 million deal that covered its own films and American distribution of the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library.

While at work growing his Magnetic Video empire, Blay also started the Video Club of America, a direct-mail sales operation through which he offered the video cassettes produced and duplicated at Magnetic Video. He used TV Guide to advertise the club, which also carried titles from Columbia Pictures and Walt Disney Productions after they each launched video divisions of their own, and the results initially allowed it to boast registration of over 9,000 users.

That subsequently provided the model for and enabled the creation of the first video rental stores, many of which were soon started thereafter.

He was later recognized by the Consumer Electronics Association as creating the idea that "sparked a retail revolution as hundreds of mom-and-pop video rental and sales stores popped up in every community in America." In 1987, home video rental income surpassed movie theater revenues for the first time. Today, movie studios routinely make more money on video rentals and sales than from the box office of theaters.