Night Owl Video is making a contrarian bet on the desire for physical media in a digital age.

BY ZACH SCHONFELD, FREELANCE WRITER

Night Owl Video founders Aaron Hamel and Jess Mills.
Photography by Nathan Bajar

When Jess Mills was a teenager growing up in Australia during the early 2000s, she and a friend went to the video store every weekend. They rented the same movie over and over: Heathers, the morbidly funny 1989 classic. “We would watch Heathers multiple times a weekend,” Mills recalls. “We ended up hiring it so often that the video store ended up giving it to us.”

“A lot of my youth, until my mid-20s,” she adds, “was spent in a video store.”

A few decades later, Mills is putting those formative experiences to use. In April, she and fellow cinephile Aaron Hamel opened Night Owl Video, a throwback shop that serves as New York City’s newest—and, presently speaking, only—brick-and-mortar video and DVD store of its kind. A modest retail space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a few blocks east of the touristy epicenter of Bedford Avenue, the store caters to movie buffs and physical media junkies frustrated with the streaming hegemony. 

“Since Videology closed, I thought there needs to be a place like this,” Hamel, 35, says, referring to the beloved Williamsburg bar/movie rental hybrid, which shuttered in 2018. “L.A. has........

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