How did the vcr become famous?

Question

I need another question of this answered for school!

Answer 1

Maybe popular is a better word than "famous".

"VCR" became  a commonly used word during the 1975-1980 time frame starting with the introduction of the Sony Betamax in 1975. .

The biggest reason  for their popularity was the ability to rent/buy movies on tape. Before the VCR you could only watch a movie by going to movie theaters or watching what ever movies made it to broadcast TV (cable TV wasn't nearly as common in those days and things like Dish and DirectTV were pure science fiction).

There were other factors:

Ability to record TV programs for later viewing. That's why I bought mine. Instead of waiting at home for your favorite show, you could do something else and watch it whenever you wanted.

Commercial p**n. Video cameras were quite expensive before the mid-1980's, so amateur p**n was not a big factor in the early days. But commercial p**n was a big factor. Before then people could only watch p**n by going to seedy movie theaters. Watching p**n also became more of a couples thing as few women wanted to be seen going into seedy movie theaters full of drunks.

There were some VCRs a few years before 1975, but they were not that popular. (There were no VCRs in the 1950s. In the mid-1950s VTRs were developed for TV networks, but they were very large and used big spools of tape. I'm thinking they were about $50,000. In 1956 that was a lot of money, perhaps $200,000 in 2008 dollars)

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I almost forgot. The movie industry did not want people to own VCRs. They fought in the courts to keep people from having them claiming they would destroy the movie industry. In 1984 the US supreme court ruled against them.

Kind of like the arguments made record companies in the 1920's about how radio would kill the record industry.

Answer 2

Amateur p**n.

It allowed private home entertainment, the ability to record movies from HBO.  

But Porno gave way to the vcr revolution

Answer 3

I'm not really old, but I do remember the VCR.  Even though the VCR technically came out in the 50's (along with the microwave oven) it didn't become popular untill the mid 70's. People wanted to buy VCR's for two reasons. The could record movies that came on television, and they could record sports games.

  VCR stands for Video Cassette Recorder. The VHS tape what NOT the first or only tape that VCR's used, but VHS (By JVC) became the most popular, mainly because it could record for 4 hours. In 1975-76 there was a battle between JVC's VHS format and Sony's Betamax format. JVC won because of the longer recording times.

   VCR's now have been replaced by DVRs and DVD recorders. So the VCR became famous because people could record movies and football games, they could also rent movies from the store, bring them home and watch them in the comfort of their house..

Hope that helps!!!