Wisecracking Robot Rents Videotapes

It’s late at night. Your dog wants a walk. You’re passing through the lobby of your apartment building when a voice calls out, “Psst, come over here. I wanna talk to you.”

Not to worry. It’s only Vidi the robot. All he wants to do is rent you a video. To accomplish that, he’ll dish out a little Hollywood gossip, crack a joke, show you a scene or two from a movie you’re considering and maybe even tell you about the film maker.

All this happens before you decide whether to rent the video, at the standard price of a dollar or two.

Though the robot will tell you it likes to be called Vidi, its full name is Vidirobot 2001. Its maker, Agoura Hills-based Advanced Video Robotics Corp., has 50 or so such machines ready to be installed in California and Texas locales in the near future.

Vidi is just one sign that video rental machines are getting ready to compete in earnest for a share of the video rental market, and are becoming more user-friendly, as the computer term goes.

Eventually, “video dispensing machines will be just like (automated bank-teller) cash machines. There will be one on every corner,” predicts John Lack, president of Nelson Vending Technology Ltd.

His company, a subsidiary of Canadian-based Nelson Holdings, Ltd., already has 200 machines in operation in Toronto that marry the technology of automatic bank teller machines with airline reservations software, so that renters can call a toll-free operator to find out which of the 200 machines has the movie they want, reserve the movie through the operator and pick it up at their convenience.

With machines scattered about Toronto at convenience stores, gas stations, drug stores and subway stations, rentals peaked at 25,000 in a single week in January, said Lack. He said that Nelson, the sister company of Beverly Hills-based Nelson Entertainment, will double the number of machines it has in Toronto by the end of the year and expects to introduce them in the United States next year.

Advanced Video Robotics hopes to have its Vidi machines in operation across the country within the next two to three years. Two already are on their way to Germany--the first of 500 that have been ordered by Transcontinental, a video marketing company, according to Transcontinental president Ehrenfried Liebich. The first two, he said, will go into a Mercedes plant in Stuttgart and a pharmaceutical factory, Bayer-Leverkusen Ag., near Dusseldorf.

Even more than places where people work and shop, however, Advanced Video Robotics President Bert Tenzer said that the cassette-dispensing machine is especially suited for apartment buildings, where the 7 x 3 1/2-foot device should be able to fit comfortably in the lobby. There, he hopes, the machine will be kept busy at night by residents who would prefer not to get out of their jammies and into their clothes for the ride to the video store.

Other video vending machines already can be found in supermarkets and corporate cafeterias. Unlike them, Vidi is intended to be a showbiz character.

“Don’t call it a machine,” Tenzer said, in mock horror. “We wanted to create something that was more than just a sterile machine--a Coke machine, a cigarette machine.”

Vidi sits in the cockpit of a “space station.” He has a screen for a face and speaks not in a robotized monotone, but with the voice of comedy writer and voice-over veteran Lennie Weinrib.

If the machine senses a person approaching within a certain distance, it will initiate a conversation. After passing along a little “Entertainment Tonight”-type news--a bit of showbiz gossip focusing on stars of the movie/video world, the voice will deliver a joke. Then it follows with a sales pitch.

If the machine does everything Tenzer says it will do, “he (Tenzer) has a unique outlet,” said the senior vice president of a major Hollywood studio, asking not to be identified because he didn’t want to appear to be endorsing a product. The robot character “will certainly get people’s attention,” he said. “But that in itself won’t make it successful. The key to success is location, location, location.”

A pioneer in the video-store business, Tenzer’s previous company, the Video Connection of America Inc., was a nationwide franchiser with 500 stores. He sold that business to launch Advanced Video, which is now in search of potential franchisees.

A public corporation, Advanced Video has “Star Trek’s” William Shatner as its spokesman and a pair of former Texas politicians--ex-Gov. Mark White and ex-Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes--on its management team. (That’s why Texas was chosen, along with California, as the introductory territory for Vidi.)

Fifty simplified versions of the machine--not Vidi as it exists today--were placed around the country for a year to test the apparatus. Those are still in operation, but last spring, movie production designer John Vallone (“Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “48 HRS.”) was recruited to perfect the new Vidi’s design and look.

Being an independent film maker himself, Tenzer came up with the idea for Vidi partly to introduce an unknown product to consumers. His own films (such as “The Summer of ‘70” and “2,000 Years Later”) “bombed in our own stores” because he couldn’t get franchisees to promote them, he said.

“The Mom-and-Pop stores have become a failure at marketing or exploiting anything other than the big blockbuster hits coming off the movie circuit,” he said. “The consumer sees an unknown title and they don’t know whether it’s garbage or what it’s about, so they pass it by. No one in the video store is going to stand up and say, ‘Mrs. Smith, this is great.’

“This has been the biggest block to all these new-age video film makers to come forth. There’s no money in it and no incentive for creative people who want to showcase their product and have it in the video store.”

Vidi to the rescue. Though the machine will stock mostly mainstream movie hits in its rotating supply of 100 videos, it’ll also provide unknown titles and guide the renter to them.