In today\u2019s technological age with DVDs, Blu-Rays, online streaming and catch-up TV, it\u2019s no wonder that the likes of the VHS tape just couldn\u2019t compete. However, when these plucky tapes first cropped up, it was revolutionary. Coupled with the VHS recorder, which allowed people to record live broadcasts to watch whenever they liked, this technology truly paved the way for the incredible achievements made in the realm of home cinema entertainment.<\/p>\n
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You may even still have some VHS tapes lying around, and possibly even an ancient VHS player. Let\u2019s take a look at how VHS took the world by storm before its short-lived popularity was dwarfed by newer, better technologies.<\/p>\n
The humble Video Home System (VHS) was developed by the Japanese company JVC in the early 1970s, it was released in Japan in 1976 and then in the US in 1977. At the time, these tapes were considered to be incredibly compact and small. They were popular for a number of reasons: they always started playing from wherever you left them off, you could fast forward through bits you didn\u2019t want to watch, and you didn\u2019t have to wait for any loading screens (maybe the old VHS still has something on today\u2019s technology).<\/p>\n
VHS tapes were as popular as DVDs are today. But things weren\u2019t all smooth sailings for VHS; it had to beat out some rival tech to retain its spot in history as the standard for home videos.<\/p>\n
Despite what you might think, the DVD was not the VHS tape\u2019s original rival; that title went to another competitor: Betamax. Betamax was released in 1975 by Sony in an attempt to create the standard for home video. JVC came out with the VHS player as a retaliation to this, and thus the Betamax vs VHS format war was born.<\/p>\n
VHS was actually inferior to Betamax in terms of picture quality, but it was popular due to its ability to record two hours of programming on one tape, as opposed to one hour on Beta. This one major difference led to Betamax\u2019s downfall, and VHS came out as the clear winner in this war. By 1987, 90% of the VCR market in the US alone was based on the VHS format. Interestingly, the porn industry actually played a pinnacle role in their success, as Sony would not allow pornographic content on its Betamax tapes.<\/p>\n
Betamax attempted to compete by releasing a new version with a longer, two-hour run time, but this reduced the picture quality, which had been their key selling point over VHS. In 1985 they brought out the SuperBeta, which sought to fix the picture issue, but by this point their share of the market had already dropped to just 10%; the battle was lost.<\/p>\n
But soon VHS came up against a new, more powerful rival: the DVD. And this brought about the VHS tape\u2019s fall from grace and eventual disappearance into obscurity.<\/p>\n
However, VHS didn\u2019t go down without a fight; in fact, it was only ten or so years ago that VHS tapes were officially out of production. The last major Hollywood film to be released in VHS format was \u2018A History of Violence\u2019 in 2006 \u2013 not counting \u2018The House of the Devil\u2019, released in 2010 on a promotional VHS to keep with the film\u2019s intent to mimic 1980s horror films. Interestingly, the last company to still be manufacturing VHS equipment, Funai, only ceased production in July 2016, citing falling sales and a shortage of components.<\/p>\n
VHS enjoyed its popularity for over twenty years. Film and home entertainment distributors adopted the DVD format to replace VHS as the primary consumer digital video distribution format around the 90s. This was in part due to DVD\u2019s higher quality video and sound, superior lifespan and the fact that it could be interactive. When the initial costs of these discs dropped to a price that the every day consumer could afford, they became available for mass consumption and DVD sales skyrocketed.<\/p>\n
Today, DVDs face competition from the likes of Blu-Rays and digital streaming services, but experts believe that we won\u2019t see the same decline of DVD as we did with VHS, as the transition just hasn\u2019t been as major as the switch over from VHS to DVD was.<\/p>\n
In today\u2019s technological age with DVDs, Blu-Rays, online streaming and catch-up TV, it\u2019s no wonder that the likes of the VHS tape just couldn\u2019t compete. However, when these plucky tapes first cropped up, it was revolutionary. Coupled with the VHS recorder, which allowed people to record live broadcasts to watch whenever they liked, this technology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.video2dvdtransfers.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}