VHS

~ the eulogy ~

Video Home System. The name was an instruction, and an accurate one: JVC set out to build a recorder a family would keep in the living room instead of a broadcast machine sold down to consumers. Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano ran the project inside the Victor Company of Japan from 1971, mostly without budget, and the HR-3300 went on sale in Japan on 9 September 1976. The United States got it on 23 August 1977.

Sony had launched Betamax the year before with a better picture and a tape that ran out after an hour. JVC gave up some picture quality for two hours of recording, which turned out to be the difference between taping a program and taping a film. Then it licensed the format to anybody who asked, so Matsushita and Hitachi were building VHS decks while Sony was still building Betamax alone.

By 1980 VHS held sixty percent of the North American market and the argument was effectively finished, although Sony kept making Betamax machines until 2002 and selling the cassettes until March 2016. What VHS actually created was bigger than a hardware standard. Films stopped being events you attended and became objects you kept on a shelf and taped off the television.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rental shelf ~

The rental business is the part that shaped how a whole generation watched anything. A tape cost too much to buy and nothing to borrow overnight, so shops appeared to sit in the gap, and in Turkey they appeared in every neighborhood. The video club was a room with shelves, a handwritten ledger and a membership card, stocking whatever had reached the country however it had reached it.

That is the entire film education of Turkish kids my age, before satellite dishes and long before anything arrived over a modem. Selection was whatever the shop had. Subtitles were whatever somebody had typed. Copies were copies of copies, and the picture degraded a little further with each generation, which is why so much of the eighties is remembered as slightly soft and slightly green.

~ the long decline ~

DVD passed VHS in US rentals in June 2003, seven years after the disc launched. The studios kept issuing tapes for a while out of habit and inventory, and A History of Violence in 2006 is generally treated as the last major release to get a cassette. Blockbuster kept renting them for a few more years in some stores, on shelves nobody was refilling.

What kept the format alive after that was not consumers. It was everything already recorded on tape: home recordings and small television archives, thousands of hours of material that existed in exactly one copy and needed a working machine to be read at all. Combo units that could dub a tape onto a disc sold for years on that basis alone.

~ the last machine ~

Funai Electric of Osaka was the last manufacturer standing. It had been building VCRs for close to thirty years and selling most of them under the Sanyo name in China and North America, and it still shipped 750,000 units in 2015, down from something like 15 million a year at the peak. In late July 2016 Nikkei reported that Funai would stop production at the end of the month, citing both the demand and the difficulty of sourcing parts for a machine nobody else made anything for anymore.

So the format died at 39 years and 10 months, having outlived its own replacement's arrival by two decades. The tapes are the real problem now. Magnetic media sheds oxide, binder degrades, and the estimates for how long a home recording from 1989 stays playable are running out around now, with fewer working decks every year to read them on.

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