The VCR meets the dustbin of history

The show’s over for the VCR, at least at one British electronics chain. Dixon says that demand for videocassette recorders has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s, while sales of DVD players have increased exponentially. Thus, after this Christmas, VCRs will no longer grace the store’s shelves. The format is becoming obsolete, and more retailers, including those here in the United States, will follow Dixon’s lead in the coming years. By this time ten years from now the video cassette will be just as much of an obscure anachronism as the vinyl LP or Super 8 movie film. 

If you’re somebody who likes to ponder the effect of technology on culture, then the videocassette is certainly a good place to start. When this technology became available to the consumer beginning in the late ‘70s, it revolutionized the way people watched TV. People were now able to record their favorite shows and watch them whenever they wanted; they were no longer at the mercy of network broadcasting schedules and, much to the chagrin of advertisers, all those annoying commercials could be bypassed with the push of the fast-forward button. A person with cable could even record movies from HBO or Showtime and watch them at his or her leisure. Although Hollywood initially worried that the rise of the VCR would lead to rampant movie piracy or impact the take at the box office as people decided to wait until movies came out on video, in the end the movie industry had no choice but to embrace the format. This led to the rise of the video store; people could now go out and rent whatever movie they wanted to see and watch it whenever they wished. Rentals weren’t limited to movies, either; there were documentaries, self-help tapes, educational tapes, do-it-yourself home improvement tapes – the VCR made a vast new realm of information readily available to the public. 

With the videocassette also came the widespread availability of video cameras. Families could now videotape the Christmas get-together or the kid’s basketball game and then immediately watch themselves on TV. There was no more waiting for Super 8 cartridges to be developed and no more fighting with the movie projector. Home movies became home videos. Furthermore, a person with a video camera could record anything and everything as it happened and immediately have the footage available for the world to see. Amateur footage became news; if the most famous amateur 8 mm film in history is the Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, then the most famous amateur videotape in history is the 1991 footage of Rodney King being savagely beaten by several Los Angeles police officers - images that would eventually spark one of the biggest and ugliest riots in modern American history. 

However, technology always marches forward, and by the end of the 1990s new digital media, which offered superior quality to the analog videotape, was beginning to make its way into the consumer market. The DVD player and the digital video camera have now overtaken the VCR, and the videocassette, as revolutionary as it might have once been, is seeing its final days as a technological staple of our culture.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. Ten years later, and I still haven't transferred by old VHS home videos to digital media. I guess I should hurry and get that done.)