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June 4, 1977. Jimmy Carter has been in office less than six months. Star Wars has just been released in theaters and is well on its way to becoming the highest grossing film to date. Kanye West will be born in four days.
Oh yeah, and VHS is about to hit U.S. shores at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Chicago. Betamax has been kicking for over two years now, but VHS creator JVC is about to drop a series of bombs on the consumer electronics world. The first is two-hour record time, doubling that of Beta and establishing enough room for a feature-length film on one tape. The second was porn (not an official announcement, but JVC had no problems with porn, while Sony banned it on Beta).
Within two years, VHS had stolen over 40 percent of the U.S. home-video market. By 1987, around 90 percent of the VCR market belonged to VHS. Regardless of image quality supremacy (a component video system with more lines of resolution), Beta’s shorter recording time and JVC’s willingness to a flood of other manufacturers led to a bitter format war that Beta just couldn’t win. Even with improvements in recording time pushing five hours, VHS kept the record-time edge with over 10 hours in SLP on a T-210 tape.
VHS lived a long life. The last stand-alone VHS VCR was manufactured by JVC in 2008, and DVD+VHS combo players are still produced. DVRs have replaced tape with hard-drives for television recording, and with DVD and Blu-ray we’re already on our second post-VHS pre-recorded medium. Video stores, however, are a fading relic of the VHS age as Netflix, VOD and RedBox are today’s norm.
I have many a fond memories of VHS. Tim Burton’s Batman and Wrestle Mania 6 were probably the most played tapes in my house when I was a kid, and the change in the couch funded many a bicycle trip to “Video Fantastic” in my sleepy little town. Nostalgia aside, VHS brought Hollywood into the home and introduced the concept of time-shifting. Without these basic concepts, we would live in a completely different world. Thanks, VHS. We’ll help you blow out all 33 candles, even if you are just a box full of old Disney movies in the attic these days.
Great story except the Kanye West part.
I gave up cable sometime ago, now I rely on Hulu, TV.com and network sites for most of my regularly scheduled program viewing via a 17” intel iMac connected to my 42” HDTV and sound system. However, I do a mix of old and new tech. I still use the VCR on a combo uint attached to my 26” HDTV/monitor in my bedroom to record shows, movies and special events not available online from the networks. They don’t look terribly bad on a smaller screen & aren’t anything I want to keep a copy of, anyway. So, there’s still life yet in VHS, for me and a few others I’d imagine. Also, still use VHS at my church(longer record times = more services on one piece of media) to record services in conjunction with DVD-r & some CD-r for audio only.
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Around 1998, when DVDs really went mainstream and the price of VCRs plummeted, I bought three additional VCRs to stack on top of my existing machine to create what I called my VHS RAID (Recording All Independently Devices) array. They were all different brands (so I could use the remotes to program each one without cross-contamination). This setup worked great to be able to record four programs at the same time—albeit with quite a bit of manual programming, organization, and upkeep as part of the process. I used this system for years until I eventually built a four-tuner HTPC in 2006 and shifted to digital. Whereas I wouldn’t go back to my clunky VHS solution, I do remember it fondly and always got a kick out of it when people would look at my stack of four VCRs and ask what in the world I was doing.