And then there was the porn. At one end of the scale, the legal end, a plethora of erotic films hit the market. They were incredibly tame compared to the explicit material that is only a Google search away for people today, but they were pretty much all that the average person (OK, let’s face it, bloke) could get access to at the time. Every video store had a top shelf full of the stuff. At the other end was the hardcore pornography that was illegal in the UK, but was exploding across the US. Much of it found its way here. It is said that the porn industry is often the first to exploit new technology, and that can certainly be argued when it came to VHS.
Such material was not without its understandable controversy, but it wasn’t so much the pornography that was dismaying the Daily Mail readers of the ’80s. They really had it in for horror films, the so-called ‘video nasties’. Titles such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead were banned in the UK for many years, despite them now being seen as classics of the genre and the inspiration for many of the major directors of today.
Home recording was the other big feature of the VCR. Never before had you been able to watch a TV programme if you weren’t sitting down in front of your set as it was broadcast. Early machines were famously hard to programme and this led to numerous devices languishing in living rooms flashing 00:00 for weeks on end, but, once mastered, users were able to record what they wanted, when they wanted. Never again did you have to miss an episode of Neighbours (especially that one where Bronwyn did a bellydance, or the one where Henry wound up naked in Mrs Mangle’s garden), or the show jumping on Grandstand.
Most homes built up a significant library of recordings, piles of blank tapes lying around, each with handwritten scribbles on the stickers. There were endless family arguments over ‘Which idiot taped over Dallas?!’ You could buy fancy plastic cases, often modelled to look like hardback books, so as to house your collection with more style. The VHS was a fundamental part of the social fabric throughout the ’80s.
The early ’90s saw another big leap in VHS use, with a growing market for purchasing, as opposed to renting, films on video. For a long time the cost of films on video had been kept high – typically between £30 and £75 so as to encourage people to rent them rather than purchase. Hardly anyone was going to pay £50 for a copy of The Toxic Avenger so your local video store coughed up on your behalf and then hoped to rent it out for more than 50 times at £1 a go, or something like that. As the ’80s came to an end, film companies realised that there was a significant desire for people to own their favourite films or TV shows, and most big films started to be issued in cheaper editions, six months to a year after the rental copy.
When you consider the speed with which technology is developing these days, it is testament to the durability and success of VHS that it has only really died out as we have entered the 21st century.
The better quality and extra bonus materials available through DVD won people over at the end of the ’90s and saw many replacing their VHS collections with this more expensive, but far sexier, new format. The launch of Sky+ and other personal video recorders changed the way we recorded TV content. As the 2000s came to a close, the manufacture of pre-recorded video cassettes had pretty much ceased, with only a handful of films being released in the format, and this was often more of a marketing exercise, such as with the film Paranormal Activity, than anything else.
Many people still own a VCR for watching home films or all the old stuff they have on tape, but the transition to digital is fast apace and the sturdy oblong video cassette is soon to be no more.
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Betamax
Despite the fact that Betamax came out two years before VHS, and was widely perceived to be of better quality, it ultimately lost the battle with its younger, chunkier partner, and became a classic example of how not to establish a new technology format in the marketplace.
Sony created Betamax for the professional and home user in 1975, but made a few bad judgement calls which meant that they went from 100% of the market upon launch, to 7.5% only ten years later.
JVC tried to make VHS as cheap and widely available as possible, licensing the technology to many other companies. Sony attempted to hold on to the perception of quality, thereby ending up with fewer machines on the market at a higher price. Consumers were eager to own video players, but were not keen to spend thousands of pounds on them, with many opting to rent. In the UK, the leading rental shops were part-owned by JVC so they really got behind VHS, and it wasn’t long before the format dominated. So much so that anyone owning a Betamax felt like a bit of a numpty, and no amount of declaring, ‘But the picture quality is amazing’ really made them feel any better.
Betamax wasn’t helped by the fact that it had a shorter running time than VHS, especially in the US with the NTSC format. Sony also made the decision not to allow porn on Betamax. Many analysts believe this last point to be the biggest reason for its failure – a sure sign of our times.
By the late ’80s, Sony pretty much knew the game was up, and started getting into the VHS market themselves. The last Betamax machine was produced in 2002.
But at least Sony learnt from their mistakes and were never again to see a new format fail in this way. Just look at the huge global dominance of the minidisc!
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Minidiscs
Such is the fast moving nature of technology that some inventions seem to die out within a short time of being born. This was the case with the minidisc.
Sony launched it in 1992 as the future of home recording, and it was intended as a high-quality alternative to analogue cassettes. With music lovers converting their album collections to compact disc, it made sense that they would want similar quality for the stuff they recorded at home, didn’t it?
The minidisc hit problems early on because it found itself up against the digital compact cassette (DCC) from Philips, and consumers weren’t sure which format to go for. Sony put their weight behind their invention by releasing albums by lots of Sony artists on the format, and also by licensing the technology to other hardware manufacturers, thereby increasing the number of players on the market.
Ultimately, though, people just weren’t all that fussed about digital home recording. They were perfectly happy paying a few quid for a five-pack of TDK blank tapes, as they were mainly using them for mixtapes, voice recordings, and other stuff that didn’t rely on incredible sound quality. The format was popular with professionals, and some studios still use them to this day, but the high price just put most punters off.
Anyway, less than a decade after the minidisc, a small white oblong called an iPod was launched, pretty much changing the face of portable music forever.
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Laserdiscs
They were the future, they really were.
But now the future has arrived they are nowhere to be seen.
Laserdiscs hit the market in the late ’70s, offering a high-quality alternative to VHS and Betamax video cassettes. A forerunner to both the CD and DVD, they were much larger than those formats – just a little bit smaller than a 12” record – were double-sided, and contained analogue data, rather than digital.
Picture quality was better than video, but discs and players were a lot more expensive so, in the UK at least, sales were restricted to early adopters and show-offs with loads of cash to piss away on fancy gadgets. There was a better take up in the US, and the format was a success in the Far East, particularly in Japan.
As the technology improved, the discs were able to carry and process digital image data as well as additional audio tracks. The first director’s commentary was on a laserdisc, an idea that