In July this year, Japan-based Funai Electronics Co. stopped producing VHS recorders, marking the end of the road for the venerable videotape standard. The Video Home System (VHS) videocassette recorder (VCR) revolutionised home entertainment in the 80s and 90s. The VCR’s demise may come as a shock, mostly because we all thought it was already dead! Incredibly last year 750 000 units were sold by Funai – the year before 1.5 million but it wasn’t low demand that has seen it’s demise; difficulty obtaining parts is the main reason the manufacturer has stopped making VHS machines.
Helical scan recording was the technology behind the worldwide consumer video revolution. The technique was invented by Ampex. Alexander M. Poniatoff founded Ampex in 1944, primarily to manufacture small motors and generators for military applications. When WWII ended, the military contracts dropped off, and Alex had to search for a new line of business to continue his company’s existence. He and his small group of engineers heard a demonstration of a Magnetophon, a German magnetic tape recorder used by Hitler during WWII. The demonstration quickly convinced Alex to redirect his company and soon it was designing and manufacturing professional-quality magnetic tape recorders. The company grew quickly and, within a short time, dominated the magnetic tape recorder market in radio, television, the record industry, and industrial and military markets for instrumentation recorders.
During the early 1950s, the broadcast industry used film to record replay programming for later broadcast. In a process called kinescope, a cameraman would aim a film camera at a video monitor to record a TV programme. This kinescope process proved to be time consuming and expensive. Ampex introduced videotape technology in 1956 at a National Association of Broadcasters meeting. Within a week of the launch of the Model VR-1000 recorder, 75 orders had been placed. With a price tag of US$45 000 per machine, it was clear that Poniatoff was onto a winner with the broadcasters queuing at the door for more. The three national US networks essentially stopped using the kinescope method of recording television programmes overnight. It is interesting to note that one of the people working on the initial project was a young student and part time employee called Ray Dolby, who, years after his service with Ampex became the founder of the now world famous Dolby Laboratories.
In 1963 Sony took the idea that Ampex created and began to expand on the technology and developed the first reel-to-reel video recorder, the 2” PV-100, which was intended for business, medical, airline and educational use. This was innovative and the technology helped to make the machines less expensive for consumers, but they were still out of reach for the majority of households. Then in 1965, Sony fine-tuned their reel-to-reel technology and created the CV -2000 one of the world first consumer video tape recorders. It recorded television programmes in black and white using the skip field process, which produced a maximum 200-lines resolution. The tape moved at a speed of 7.5 inches per second and each reel of videotape cost about US$40 and could record one hour of video. In the following years, Sony continued to work on their technology and eventually created the Sony U-Matic in 1971. This was the first videocassette model and first commercially marketed format designed for consumers to use. It was capable of recording 90 minutes worth of footage, but they were generally too expensive for average consumers added to which it’s design only allowed playback of a recording via a special monitor, rather than a television. A year later Philips released their entry into the videocassette market – the N1500 VCR complete with built in TV tuner and an analogue clock timer, perhaps the first truly domestic, consumer videocassette recorder.
The 1970s was an innovative decade and a period when major improvements were made to video tape recorders, resulting in the eventual creation of the VHS standard. However, during this time several other companies also made attempts to produce a television recording device, hoping the majority of the world would embrace their product. For the videocassette recorders to become a popular appliance, it needed to be affordable for people to buy and easy for them to operate. As a result two Japanese companies, Sony and JVC (Japanese Victor Company) developed rival VCR formats in the early 1970s, which would later evolved into the Betamax /VHS Format Wars. The first VCR to use VHS standard was the Victor HR-3300, and was introduced in 1976. Throughout the 1970s VHS and Sony battled each other for dominance in the video recording market. By the mid 1980s VHS had achieved a supreme dominance. Philips abandoned its latest VCR model, the Video 2000 in 1985 and Sony folded to consumer demand by finally producing VHS VCR’s of it’s own.
Once considered luxury items, VHS machine prices plummeted in the late 1990s mainly in an effort to keep the tape market alive as DVD technology was being developed. Panasonic even developed and released the PV-HD1000, a D-VHS digital VCR designed for recording HDTV but the format failed in favour of disc technology. There is no doubt that VHS will forever remain historically important because it marked the first time that the public could obtain almost any film release old or new and take it home to watch. The video rental culture transformed movie watching, and gave many titles that failed in theaters a new lease on life, indeed some of them becoming cult movies. If it wasn’t for VHS we may never have seen the likes of true classics like I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957), Vandemonium Plus (1987) and A Fistful of Fingers (1995) a few of the hundreds of titles that were only ever released in that format.
Although the VHS VCR is gone, its legacy cannot be forgotten. We should all bow our heads in remembrance of the VCR for popularising the concept of file sharing, binge-watching and time-shifting habits that have become a norm in our home entertainment habits today.
