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Showing posts with the label End of VHS

R.I.P To VHS: The End Of VCR

This month will see the last videocassette recorder (VCR) produced in Japan, according to reports. Once no home was complete without a library of chunky black cassettes and a recording device with a slot you had to keep telling the kids not to insert their toast into. Home video changed everything. Now you could record TV programmes and watch them again, rather than having to commit them to memory and then play them back in your head. Plus you could rent movies from the video shop and enjoy them at home, instead of having to sit in a cinema alongside other humans who might not appreciate Tom Selleck or Molly Ringwald as much as you did. In the "format wars" of the 1970s and 80s, Video Home System, as no-one ever called it, handily saw off rival like LaserDisc and BetaMax. Some speculated the pornography industry's preference for VHS made the difference, although this has never been proved. The adverts in which an animated skeleton, channelling Buddy Holly, promised th...