Home Cinema Viewing

July 17, 1988  (grandmother accidentally dated this one "1888")

The most unexpected result of the marketing of the videocassette recorder has to be the rise of the home movie viewing industry, and of the 27,000 videotape rental businesses that have given a new generation of entrepreneurs a shot at the American Dream.

The home videocassette recorder, commonly known as the VCR, was not intended on it's introduction to be a medium for watching movies at all; that honor was to go to the videodisc, the video equivalent of the phonograph record.  The movie industry and U.S. television manufacturers saw the videodisc as ideal:  the discs would be strictly a playback format, so the film and TV industries would not be threatened by copyright piracy and time-shifting, and the discs, unlike tapes would be stamped out like cookies, cheaply and quickly.

As a bonus, the film producers would have ultimate control over the sale of their product, and they visualized customers supplementing their movie-house going with large libraries of discs at home.

As we know, it didn't work out as planned.  Two discs technologies were actually brought to market in our country, R.C.A.'s Selectavision from the U.S., and Pioneer's Laservision from Japan.  Selectavision was an underdeveloped technology, using a needle in a groove in the same way a phonograph record does.  The image and sound were of fair quality, but even though the discs were sealed in hard plastic cases when not in use, dust would get in the grooves causing extremely annoying skips, pops, and the repetition of single frames.  By the time R.C.A. had solved these problems and had added stereo sound, it had lost half-a-billion bucks and gave up.

Laservision, using, you guessed it, laser technology, had more promise.  The laser pickup did not actually touch the disc, so there was no wear.  Static free digital sound was later added, and the pictures were sharp and clear and in theory, skip-free.  And the discs were still relatively cheap to manufacture, though not so cheap as R.C.A.'s But the players were a thousand dollars, manufacturing problems resulted in huge quantities of defective discs, and although cheaper players are now available, Laservision remains a minor player in the video movie game.Sony of Japan, meanwhile, introduced the Betamax, a machine that could both record and play back sound and images on magnetic tape.  The Betamax had a built-in clock so that it could record unattended, and was sold as a "timeshifting" device, that is, a device that allows one to watch TV programs that one would otherwise miss, or to watch two shows that are broadcast at the same time.  What Sony didn't count on was that purchasers wanted to tape broadcast movies and that their machines could only record for one hour.

The giant Japanese Victor Company, or J.V.C., already miffed at Sony's "take it or leave it" attitude toward licensing its Betamax system, grabbed the opportunity and announced it's competing Video Home System (VHS) which could record and play for two hours, and was cheaper to manufacture.  VHS sales took off and in spite of such innovations as Beta II, Beta Hi-Fi sound, and SuperBeta, Sony's market share dwindled.

With the market ripe for pre-recorded movies, and with the price of VCR's tumbling thanks to the competition between Beta and VHS, the major studios had no choice but to sell videotapes.  And then, in what has to be the most bone-headed marketing ploy since the Edsel, they priced their movies at $60 to $80, more then any but the wealthy could afford.

In 1978 a failed businessman named George Atkinson opened a video rental business in Los Angles to serve the non-buying public, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.

Just a quick note to add that I've already messed up the order and missed two pages, so I have to back track.  Ah well.

Even more amusing then my failure to spot two pages stuck together, I remember the movie discs, we had a machine at home.  The lifespan was incredibly short and my dad called it an incredible lack of judgement on his part to not see the potential the VCR would have in the modern market.  The first movie we owned was "The Great Muppet Caper".  A classic no matter how you chose to view it.