Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Jim Burroway

July 23rd, 2016

From The Advocate, January 8, 1981, page 5.

From The Advocate, January 8, 1981, page 5.

Yesterday came news that the last manufacturer of the video cassette recorder will end production by the end of this month:

The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corporation of Japan, said in a statement Thursday that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of “difficulty acquiring parts.”

…According to the company — which said in the statement, “We are the last manufacturer” of VCRs “in all of the world” — 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.

…The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s, when Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS formats began to compete. VHS gained the upper hand the following decade; but Sony stopped producing Betamax cassette tapes only in 2016.

230037778_4e8c70e60eThe VCR and its constantly blinking “12:00” is credited for making binge watching and time-shifting possible possible for the first time. It made porn available to the masses for the first time, and it also created demand for on-demand video. Before VCRs came along, if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to hope it would be available at a local theater, and once the movie’s run was complete, it was as good as gone unless you were lucky enough to catch it on television sometime. VCRs changed all of that. Today, it’s all about Netflix and chill, but in the eighties and the nineties, it was a Blockbuster night.

I have to admit I was surprised to learn that VCRs were still being produced. And I’m even more surprised to learn that they sold 750,000 machines last year. Caetlin Benson-Allott, who teaches film and media studies at Georgtown, explains:

First of all, VHS has a longer shelf life than DVD. The average shelf life of a DVD is about 25 years given average use, and if it’s a DVD-R, it can be as short as five or 10 years, depending on the quality of manufacture. VHS, if stored right, is estimated to last 50 years. …Second, while the U.S. has gone over to digital television broadcasts, a lot of countries haven’t. Third and finally, because it is a mechanical device, there is the capacity to repair it yourself, assuming you can get or manufacture parts.

She mourns the VCR’s demise and thinks we’ve lost an important human connection because of it:

What I miss most—and I have to say I already miss this—about VHS are the video stores. I miss walking into the cornucopia that was my local Lincoln Video of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and finding out about some guy named Scorsese when I was way too young to be watching his movies. And then working back from him to other things that he liked. I miss having a relationship with a video clerk and the esoteric taste, the evolution of taste, that I got from knowing that guy or that gal. We have that in a sense with the you-might-also-like function on Netflix, but that’s an algorithm replacing a human relationship, which is never the same thing.

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