Why were vcrs popular

Rogers, Tom Cruise, and E. The advent of television in the American home in the late s and its dramatic adoption throughout the s offered a whole new entertainment portal for Americans, who had grown accustomed to radio as the medium of choice in their homes. Now they could watch comedies like I Love Lucy , Westerns like Gunsmoke , and riveting dog-driven dramas like Lassie —presuming they were in front of their sets when the shows came on.

Electronics manufacturers knew consumers wanted a way to free themselves from appointment television. In the s, companies like RCA were trying to crack the code of practical video storage. The thinking was, if you could record audio on magnetic tape, why not video? But video footage requires much more data than audio, and therefore needs to move much more quickly around the tape heads in the machine. A company named Ampex figured out that instead of moving the tape around the heads at ridiculous speeds, the heads themselves should spin.

With that breakthrough, Ampex introduced the Mark IV in But … there was a problem: The device was the size of a desk. Not exactly an affordable holiday gift. Ampex only sold a couple hundred of the machines to broadcasters who wanted to record their programs and had the budget to invest in the equipment. One of the first practical television recording solutions for households was the Cartrivision , which debuted in The Cartrivision used 8-inch plastic cartridges that were inserted into a compartment on a television console to record shows.

You could also rent feature films like Dr. You needed two hands to program a recording, with one pressing a button while the other twirled a knob. When you did manage to perfect your ambidexterity and get it working, the picture quality was still poor due to a data-conserving recording process. On a sales floor, it looked like any other television, except it cost three times as much.

By , Cartrivision was done. That was probably for the best, because what was coming next was something the modest Cartrivision would never have been able to compete with: two massive Japanese companies spending millions of dollars to outdo each other in a bid to conquer the lucrative world of allowing people to watch movies in their underwear.

It started peacefully. Both Sony and JVC recognized that television viewers wanted to engage in time-shifting, which allowed them to watch what they wanted when they wanted. In fact, the companies, with a little help from Ampex, collaborated to launch a machine called the U-matic in The U-matic was developed by Sony in concert with JVC and Matsushita now known as Panasonic in the hopes it could become a universal standard. Since no one you know has ever owned a U-matic, you can probably guess there were problems.

First, it weighed Second, there was the cost. Because most people opted to buy, say, a lightly-used mid-size car instead, the U-matic went the way of the Ampex machine and was used mainly for commercial purposes. Sony and JVC knew they were on to something, but the machines needed to be much smaller, and so did the cassette tapes. Both companies agreed a home video recorder should use magnetic tape about a half-inch in width. But Sony founder Masaru Ibuka was more concerned about the size of the cassette itself.

He told his engineers that blank tapes should be about the size of a paperback book. Their designers, including Yuma Shirashi, who was general manager of the Research and Development Division, thought the most important feature was recording time—at least two hours. That would be enough for a couple of television dramas, a movie, or at least a significant chunk of a sporting event. If a cassette had to be a little bigger and the picture quality slightly inferior, well, that was a fair trade-off.

He wanted a worldwide standard. He knew it would take years for people to adopt the new technology, even comparing it to the steady growth of a bonsai tree. Both, he said, require years of unwavering commitment before bearing fruit. Best pillows. Best camera. Best TV. Best webcam. Best cordless phones Best HDMI cables Razer Blade 14 review. For the first time, people were able to easily record things.

The idea of watching one show while recording another was a major turning point back then, and a breakthrough in technology , literally revolutionizing the home theater industry. Although the VHS seems as old as dinosaurs—especially when comparing it to all the high-tech gadgets we have now—its usage was discontinued only about a decade ago.

And we all scoff at the price tag attached to the latest iPhone releases. Obviously, it wasn't very popular or successful with the general public due to its outrageously high cost. Sony took the idea and came up with a new version in , but it was still a little pricey for most people as most new and innovative tech was.

Later, in , Sony introduced the Betamax. First out of the gate, the Betamax was cutting edge in audio and sound quality for the time. It was truly the first great format war.

As a matter of fact, enough VHS tapes were produced that year to cover the earth-moon distance more than times! It featured a long playtime, fast-rewinding and fast-forwarding. But in its 50 years life span the VCR revolutionized the movie industry, changed television-watching habits, triggered the first "format wars," and raised new copyright questions, establishing jurisprudence on fair use. When television first took off in the s, the only means of preserving video footage was through kinescope, a process in which a special motion picture camera photographed a television monitor.

Kinescope film took hours to develop and made for poor quality broadcasts. So most television networks just made live broadcasts direct from the studio. But in countries with several time zones, live broadcast was a problem. In the U. Pacific time in Los Angeles. The only solutions were to repeat the live broadcast three hours later for LA, or to develop the kinescope film of the first broadcast and rush to air it on time. There was a pressing need for new recording technology. The big electronic companies of the day raced to develop the technology, working on recorders that used magnetic tape.

The Ampex Corporation, however, working in secrecy, based its research on a rotating head design, which had been patented by an Italian inventor in for use in audio recordings.

It caused a sensation. The orders from the television networks, however, came pouring in. CBS was the first to use the new technology, airing Douglas Edwards and the News on November 30, , from New York then replaying the broadcast from its Hollywood studios a few hours later. From that day on, Edwards never had to repeat a broadcast, and television changed forever.

RCA pooled patents with Ampex and licensed in the Ampex technology. The new goal was to develop a video machine for home use.

It had to be solid, low-cost and easy to operate. Sony released a first home model in , followed by Ampex and RCA in