News of the very last VHS VCR rolling off the Funai Electronics assembly line in Japan provoked headlines and comedy show gags recently — most with a derisive “Who remembers them?” slant.
But VHS (and its longtime rival Betamax) were a really big deal — revolutionizing industries, user habits, and our comfort with technology.
The VCR deserved a more respectful assessment, worthy of its significant place in viewing history. My suggestions follow.
The great time machine story. In this age of rampant video on demand, we take “time shifting” for granted.
But until the first home videocassette recorders came to market in the mid-1970s, packed with TV tuners and timers that allowed the devices to record shows for viewing later, the concept was foreign and slow to sink in. An early Quasar VCR even called itself “the great time machine” to zap the message home.
Time shifting scared TV networks, which relied on the “appointment TV” concept to condition viewers like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ll just have to be home on Sunday to see “Bonanza” and “Ed Sullivan!”
The one person/one show rule also kept many a viewer from checking out counter-programming.
Adding insult to injury, Nielsen showed no interest in counting the noses of time shifters. Now they do — even three days later.
The “content wants to be free” story. The TV and movie factories likewise freaked at the coming of the VCR, fearing that a consumer’s ability to stockpile shows would screw with their program syndication (reruns).
Sony Electronics (before it bought into movie and music producing companies) carried that battle against MCA-Universal Studios (now owned by Comcast) all the way to the Supreme Court in a classic fight popularly known as “The Betamax Case.” The court essentially said that networks didn’t own airwaves, the public did. So once broadcasters bought and put content out there, it was “fair use” for the public to view it in time-shifted fashion.
On the upside, this new ability to record and save shows on a VCR hooked hundreds of millions of people worldwide on “library building,” leading to a blockbuster boom in the sale and rental of pre-recorded videotapes. Consumers kept buying, as tech companies introduced higher-grade, faster-access video storage/playback media — DVD and Blu-ray videodiscs. For years, this became a classic tail wagger, making studios more money than their first-run movies. And often salvaging box office dogs.
On the downside, many a rogue operator came to use home recorders — judged legal for time shifting — for duplicating and sharing content without the need to pay pesky licensing fees. This misread of their “rights” helped lead to the plague of piracy, especially poisonous in the file-sharing age.
And it also led, one might editorialize, to all those web-based purveyors (bet you could Google a few) who’ve made trillions with the argument “Those guys put it out there; we’re just sharing.”
Survival of the fittest. Some historians have argued, straight-faced, that VHS overcame arch-rival Betamax’s almost two-year lead-to-market because the porn industry favored VHS.
Hubris is what really killed Sony’s format, and won the day for rival JVC’s Video Home System. In scaling down the commercial U-Matic cassette recording system used by TV news crews, Sony engineers foolishly presumed the same one-hour tape recording capacity that pleased broadcasters would suffice with consumers.
RCA — then the leading electronics brand in the U.S. — asked Sony to “pretty please make us a two-hour tape recorder.” Sony initially resisted, so RCA backed the rival JVC-developed format, initially designed as a two-hour recorder and then adding (at RCA’s request) a lower resolution four-hour (per T-120 tape) recording mode. The latter was famously introduced in August 1977, at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. “The one and only” Sony would never catch up, or be able to claim “We’re on the top of the world.”
What do I do with my VHS tapes? Some might argue that holding on to low-picture resolution (240 interlaced lines) VHS tapes is pointless in this age of high-definition (1080 lines progressively scanned) Blu-ray discs and HD streaming services like Netflix.
And it’s highly unlikely VHS will ever make a nostalgic, “special qualities” comeback, like vinyl records and (to a much lesser degree) audio cassettes and “instant print” film.
On the other hand, some cult faves have not made the shift to DVD and Blu-ray, inspiring the “VHS Vault” series now found at shoutfactorytv.com.
And honestly, the pit is not bottomless at Netflix. Titles come and go, leased for just a year or two. Netflix’s total inventory is down by a third since 2014, reports AllFlicks.
So transferring rare tape titles to DVD would seemingly be a good idea except — oops — many VHS titles issued after 1985 have Macrovision signal scrambling.
Moving your home-recorded videos from sticking and flaking-prone magnetic tape to a more durable DVD optical disc form is definitely wise, with this caveat. Transfer the tapes using the same VCR or camcorder you recorded them on, as differences in recording and playback heads (narrower in three- speed machines) can lead to tracking errors, even fuzzier pictures and garbled sound.
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