[HN Gopher] How much did VHS tapes cost in the 80s?
___________________________________________________________________
How much did VHS tapes cost in the 80s?
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-03-09 05:49 UTC (2 days ago)
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| watersb wrote:
| Around 2000, I paid about $100 for a movie on VHS, in order to
| give it as a gift.
|
| It was the timing that was key: pre-recorded tapes were priced to
| be sold to rental stores upon initial VHS release, then sold at a
| fraction of release price a month later.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| This sounds right. I remember getting old VHS for a few dollars
| at thrift stores.
|
| Once VHS was "competing" with DVDs the cost came down to about
| $5 to $10 bucks.
| datavirtue wrote:
| All the paranoia about consumers copying movies is hilarious. It
| was not a thing. We owned two video stores and didn't even copy
| movies, with plenty of extra VCRs available. Most people didn't
| have extra VCRs to copy with and wouldn't even know how to do it
| if they did. Their paranoia propped up the video rental industry
| for over a decade until they figured out sell-though.
| incanus77 wrote:
| First home movie I saw was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the
| Lost Ark. My neighbor had a VHS player in their basement den with
| a _wired remote_.
| bitwize wrote:
| The thing you have to remember is that the movie industry HATED
| consumer VCRs and videotape. Industry insiders considered VCRs
| and tapes tools for copyright infringement and nothing more --
| even after the Supreme Court ruled VCRs legal in _Sony v.
| Universal_ in 1984. Jack Valenti went to his grave believing that
| the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. And my girlfriend 's
| parents, who worked as an attorney and paralegal for the
| entertainment industry, banned VCRs from their home even into the
| late 80s.
|
| To the movie industry, a movie was something you went to the
| theater and watched ONCE. If you wanted to see the movie again,
| you had to pay again. For consumers to buy a copy of a movie they
| could see again and again was, to studio heads, felony contempt
| of business model. But once market pressures forced their hands,
| the studio heads relented only somewhat. They would price the VHS
| tapes out of typical consumer reach, but allow them to be
| purchased by rental shops to be rented out to consumers, thus
| preserving the "pay for limited viewing" business model. Of
| course, once the first studio buckled to market pressures to
| release home copies for around $30 a pop, as described in the
| article, all bets were off.
|
| Also note that VCRs were only ruled legal based on a very narrow
| exception: the Court felt that if there was a TV show that aired
| once, never to be aired again (Star Wars Holiday Special?), and
| you absolutely positively could not be in front of the TV to see
| it, you should be able to record it and then view the recording
| at a later time exactly once. This is the "time shifting"
| exception. Otherwise, VCRs are still mainly tools of copyright
| infringement in the eyes of the law. We seem to have this idea
| that if we copy something for personal use only, we're in the
| clear legally; Justice Blackmun, in his dissent in _Sony_ ,
| pointed out that this is not the case, and personal recordings of
| movies, music, etc. still infringe copyright and are violations
| of the law.
| mgerdts wrote:
| My dad ran several video stores from about 1988 to about 1994. He
| even bought out the earliest video store in our town - Hollywood
| Video - and switched the name of all stores to Hollywood Video.
| He got out of the business when the national chain wanted to come
| to town and offered him a ridiculously low price for all the
| stores. Sadly he took their first offer. They didn't care about
| the stores, they just realized they couldn't win any trademark
| infringement lawsuit against the owner of a store that at one
| time rented beta tapes and laserdiscs only after you paid a steep
| membership fee.
|
| In the first years, the blockbuster movies would cost him about
| $65 each to buy and they did creep up over the years. While in
| theory you could rent them several times per week for about $3,
| in reality the newest releases (maybe less than a month old) only
| completely rented out on the weekends. It was hard to get most
| people to walk into the store to get a deeply discounted new
| release most weekdays. Once the movie had been released for a
| month or so, most almost-new-releases would have some copies that
| sat on the shelf on the weekends too.
|
| The "sell through" movies - those that sold retail at $15 - $30 -
| were better. He would buy a large number of them and they would
| rent well for a few weeks. After the initial flurry of heavy
| rentals for a few weeks, he would start to sell them off. I think
| there was a small profit - better than the expensive movies which
| were almost always money losers.
|
| Then there was this small little box in the corner (or under the
| counter in one location) where some other movies were kept. The
| movie cases for maybe 50 movies were all collapsed. Each of these
| movies rented for nearly the same cost as a new release, with
| little discounting for old titles. $30 was a very expensive one,
| most were about $15. They would rent well throughout the week,
| mostly to very loyal customers. There was only ever one copy of
| each title per store and the stock rotated between stores with
| occasional swaps with stores owned by others in neighboring towns
| until the movies wore out. Certain portions of scenes would wear
| out before others, presumably due to replaying action shots. Had
| it not been for this little box of porn occupying maybe 10 square
| feet of a 600(?) sq ft store, he would have been out of business
| long before Hollywood Video threw him a lifeline.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| I worked briefly at a video store part time around 2000. There
| wasn't that brisk of a business from the little private room,
| at least not during the times when I worked (which included
| week days). But by this time home internet was broadly
| available, perhaps only dial up for many people in my area but
| it was still available. I wonder if the new competition for
| this subsidy business wasn't a bigger part of the fall of video
| stores than it seemed to be.
|
| Although, most of the other staff were quite "judgey" so its
| possible that I just worked at a store that wasn't popular with
| those customers.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Had it not been for this little box of porn occupying maybe
| 10 square feet of a 600(?) sq ft store_
|
| Did it have the funny saloon-style doors that I remember always
| blocking us kids from seeing what's inside?
| mgerdts wrote:
| One of the stores he would do swaps with had a somewhat
| private area like that. I think my dad did not build such a
| thing because of fear that people would, umm, linger. I don't
| know if that was a real problem at the other store or not.
| Also, if the area offers some privacy from the staff it is
| harder to take a quick glance to make a guess as to whether
| anyone was shopping this area and whether they looked old
| enough.
|
| I think that there would often be standees advertising movies
| that shielded the area from visibility from the street and
| casual non-staff observers. You had to be "this tall" to see
| into the box, the front was covered with 18+ signs, and it
| was either next to the counter or placed on the counter at
| the store where it was stored behind/under the counter. There
| really wasn't a problem with youngsters taking peeks.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I don't really "collect" vhs tapes. I have a few that are weird
| or have never been released on any more modern format but I
| wouldn't pay more a few dollars for any tape.
|
| At least once a week the vhs collector group I am in on facebook
| has posts from people asking how much a vhs movie is worth or
| offering to sell some common Disney "black diamond" movie for
| thousands of dollars.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Random comment but one of my first memories of understanding
| price as a kid was going to a appliance store and seeing the
| newly released Ghostbusters VHS for 80 bucks. I thought about all
| the candy and video games I could buy for that.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers
| are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at
| least for now.
|
| GenX'er here. I'm very nostalgic for 80s movies. There is no
| reason to buy a VHS version of it though, just like there's no
| reason to buy a cassette for 80s music. Vinyl only came back
| because of the unique sound properties, something that VHS or
| cassette doesn't have.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Cassette is pretty popular for some kinds of indie releases
| right now, though, especially synthwave.
| blunte wrote:
| My first official job as a teen was working in a video rental
| store. Indeed, new movies cost $40 to $80. Blank tapes came in
| different supposed quality levels (similar audio cassettes), and
| cost $5-$10 apiece. Writable CDs were also quite expensive at
| first. But floppy disks were also expensive at first.
|
| Video rentals, before Blockbuster, cost $1-$4 depending on
| whether it was a new release and other specials (like rent 3 for
| a discount, etc.)
|
| As VCRs got more powerful, and rewinders came into existence,
| periodically a tape would get ripped off one end of its spool.
| Then it was a task to open the tape and do some minor surgery to
| fix it. And of course, some tapes were designed to be difficult
| to open, having permanent rivets. Those were solved with a dremel
| and some careful work. When the tape costs $80, it's worth an
| hour of teenager time to fix.
|
| We have it so much better now with streaming, although our
| appetites and consumption levels have grown so much that we often
| lament "having nothing to watch".
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember when the first CD-R drives came out, a blank CD was
| around $100. In the early days, CD distribution of software was
| in some ways an intrinsic copy protection because computer hard
| drives typically had less capacity than a CD and it was not
| uncommon to run the software directly from the CD (not to
| mention that if you wanted to duplicate the CD it would cost
| $100 for a blank CD-R).
| rasz wrote:
| Speaking of CD being poor mans copy protection, sometimes
| quantity of disks was enough.
|
| In Europe around 1996 Russian pressed pirate CDs showed up en
| masse. Often not direct 1:1 copies, but scene releases with
| modded homebrew translations, sometimes even including custom
| voice acting! It was especially hilarious in case of pirate
| localizations by Russians to other Slavic languages (mostly
| done by students barely speaking target language).
|
| Quick google found https://chess-
| progress.ru/en/photos/lokalizaciya-versii-loka...
|
| "Localization of foreign computer games in Russia was carried
| out by computer pirates in small studios from 1995 to 2005
| who worked on a illegal basis. The most famous similar studio
| was "Fargus Multimedia". Localization made by such studios,
| most often had poor quality. Not only the text in the game
| could be translated, but also the name of the game itself."
|
| Now the interesting thing about those pirate CDs was the
| business model. Smuggling and sales were mafia controlled,
| with fixed price set at ~$15 per disk. This made multi CD
| releases like Under a Killing Moon (4xcd), Phantasmagoria
| (7xcd), Ripper (6xcd), Wing Commander 3 (4xcd) etc much
| cheaper from legal sources. Break even was somewhere between
| 2 and 3 CD releases.
| blunte wrote:
| > custom voice acting!
|
| Be Kind Rewind https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0799934/
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "for that price you can subscribe to streaming to watch whatever
| you want"
|
| ... not in today's fractured landscape, unless by "subscribe" you
| mean have a VPN and "whatever you want" means piracy over VPN.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I like the tone of the article describing vhs has some mystical
| artifact of antiquity (I'm old).
|
| trailers and reviews on demand weren't a thing when vhs rentals
| were common. All you had to go on was the cover of the box and
| the description on the back. It was a roll of the dice renting a
| movie you hadn't seen before.
|
| Please be kind and rewind.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Never happier to see a media format die as when VHS went away.
| sgerenser wrote:
| He mentions that studios assumed people copied rented tapes, but
| I have to imagine that was relatively uncommon. Not many people
| had two VCRs, and by the time VCRs got cheap enough that people
| started to have multiples, most rental VHS tapes were protected
| by MacroVision[0] copy protection. Which was relatively easy to
| bypass if you knew what you were doing but wasn't something the
| average home movie viewer was going to bother with.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System
| varjag wrote:
| By the end of the decade copying was super common.
| cpach wrote:
| Didn't grow up in the US but I knew only one other family that
| had two VCRs. Recording movies from TV was common though.
| wil421 wrote:
| Did copy protection really help? In the early-mid 90s my dad
| was dead set against copying VHS tapes. A neighbor down the
| street had no problem copying anything from live TV to
| Blockbuster rentals. Their library was a massive mess of tapes
| from various sources.
|
| I don't recall them having any special setup except 2 VCRs.
| They also weren't the type to be able to bypass copy right.
| acomjean wrote:
| I was in high school mid 80s. I brought my VHS over to a
| friends to try and copy a tape. It didn't work. We couldn't
| figure out why and an internet search to discover work
| arounds wasn't yet available.
|
| So I guess it kinda worked. Honestly though most movies we
| were watching were rented anyway, we weren't buying very
| many.
|
| we would tape some shows off TV too.
| randombits0 wrote:
| MacroVision worked by messing with the automatic gain control
| by fluctuating white bars in the horizontal blanking
| interval. Cheap, low end VCRs didn't have automatic gain
| control and made much better copies.
| [deleted]
| wil421 wrote:
| That's probably why they could make copies. They definitely
| weren't perfect copies but I figured they reused tapes and
| recorded over stuff.
| irrational wrote:
| My father in law has a room completely filled with VCR tape
| copies. My wife tells me that they weren't allowed to mention
| them since they attended a church that an FBI agent also
| attended. The FBI agents job was looking for people making
| copies of Copyright material (I presume on a larger scale than
| my FIL). In the nearly 3 decades I've visited their home, I've
| never seen anyone watch a single one of those VCR tapes. LOL
| clsec wrote:
| If they tried they'd probably be unwatchable. VHS tapes
| degrade over time by just existing, you don't have to watch
| them for them to degrade. In the late 90's I was a part of a
| group on Usenet that digitized old VHS tapes. Though the tech
| at the time didn't allow for very good digitization.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I watched some 90's videotapes from the early days of
| movies being sold at affordable prices at my parents house
| last year. VHS quality has always been poor compared to
| DVD, but they didn't seem particularly degraded.
|
| They have been sitting in a climate controlled room all
| that time.
| jonhohle wrote:
| You probably haven't watched a VHS tape recently. I've not
| come across one that's degraded by simply sitting on a
| shelf (or in a garage that got up to 120oF each summer for
| the past nearly 20 years.
| retro64 wrote:
| Agreed. I recently popped in Star Trek V for kicks and it
| worked flawlessly. However, I must say, while the
| physical tape may have aged well, the content surely did
| not - yeesh, what a stinker.
|
| Anyway, it all depends on the storage - the best advice I
| ever heard was "store your things where you live" (in
| other words most of us don't live in the attic or the
| basement).
| dehrmann wrote:
| Of all the Star Treks to watch for kicks, you picked V?
| I'd have no complaints if it and Start Trek I ceased to
| exist.
| brimble wrote:
| The first film has _a lot_ more going for it than V. It
| 's not great if you go in expecting a Star Trek movie,
| though. Scratches a _very_ different itch.
| retro64 wrote:
| Oh, I know it. I came upon it rummaging and popped it in
| later that evening.
|
| Honestly, I think in a single act I nearly destroyed my
| youngest son's interest in the series by having him watch
| the first one with me. I haven't seen those movies in
| years, but it really reminded me how big Star Trek was
| back then to be able make such bold assumptions of the
| audience on so many levels.
|
| You know though, all this talk - I think I'm going to dig
| up another and watch it tonight. There's actually a
| couple I still haven't seen.
| gkop wrote:
| Hang on, "unwatchable" or "degraded"? Maybe you don't
| remember what a brand new VHS tape should look like, but
| they definitely do degrade steadily over time even when
| properly stored. Not to say they're guaranteed
| "unwatchable", but definitely degraded.
| clsec wrote:
| Yeah, I probably worded that wrong. And that degradation
| is why we were digitizing them. We wanted the best
| quality we could get with what we had. The movies we were
| working on were out of print and would never be released
| again in any form.
| bombcar wrote:
| We had a family friend with something similar but a few years
| later - and every single tape was legit because he'd buy the
| remainders from the rental stores when they sold them off.
| retrac wrote:
| By the 90s the typical American household already had > 2 TVs.
| Two VCRs would not be that uncommon. It was common enough
| active measures were taken to prevent copying (as you linked).
| After all, VHS tapes are rewritable and quite durable. If you
| don't mind minor degredation you can reuse them dozens of
| times, or more. People would accumulate dozens (if not
| hundreds) of VHS tapes over the years with stuff they didn't
| want to keep anymore. So spare media wasn't usually an issue.
|
| Now, I don't recall all that many copied rental movies, growing
| up. I _do_ recall a _lot_ of films off TV being recorded and
| passed around and even duplicated, though. Knowing someone with
| cable or satellite TV who was reliable in hitting pause /record
| during the commercials was Important.
| uxp100 wrote:
| I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was
| rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15
| inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith
| show or an old TV in the garage for football games.
|
| But I'm sure there are some trade organizations stats about
| all this somewhere. And yes, I know people who had huge
| catalogs of movies recorded off TV (on beta lol).
| brimble wrote:
| > I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was
| rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15
| inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith
| show or an old TV in the garage for football games.
|
| This is accurate, though by the early 90s some houses had
| _three_ TVs. The third kind was the one from the late 70s
| or early 80s that 'd recently been replaced by a new "main"
| TV, which older TV sat in a spare bedroom or basement "rec
| room" and you had to hit it sometimes to keep it working.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| In the early ($99) days of VHS movies though, I don't believe
| MacroVision was a thing.
|
| I recall frequenting the only video rental store in Homer,
| Alaska (ma-and-pa, of course, this was pre-Blockbuster and a
| small town in Alaska, of course) and I believe they would rent
| multiple copies of a popular title but dubbed onto blank VHS
| tapes.
|
| I also had friends and relatives that had a few pirated films.
| The sci-fi nerds I knew all had "Star Wars" and "Empire" on VHS
| long before it was either possible or affordable to (probably
| picked up at a booth at a sci-fi convention).
|
| I know, not the majority though by any means.
| irrational wrote:
| The first time I saw Star Wars was at a drive-in. The second
| time I saw it was on laserdisc(!) at someone's house years
| later. The third time was when it was broadcast on TV. The
| fourth time was on VCR tape. The fact that our family could
| watch a movie in our home just by going to the rental store
| was mind blowing.
| retro64 wrote:
| I remember it being a big deal when Star Wars finally came
| to TV. I don't understand why, but my kids laugh when I
| tell them for the big event we hauled my aunt's large TV
| across the lawn (she lived next door) over to our house
| just so we could watch it in color instead of on the 15" BW
| that we had. We also made popcorn.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| For years, "Star Wars" was one of the "big movies" that
| wasn't available on home video. The documentary "The
| Making of Star Wars," on the other hand, was released on
| VHS (and Betamax?) very early on, and I recall as being
| prominently displayed in seemingly every video rental
| store.
|
| Ironically, "The Making of Star Wars" doesn't currently
| appear to be available for streaming on any of the
| services, at least according to JustWatch.com.
| crtasm wrote:
| Appears to be a full copy on
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak
| softwarebeware wrote:
| > They assumed every time someone rented a movie, they copied it.
|
| That's because they did! In my experience at least. I also
| remember when duplicating a tape at home with two VCRs stopped
| working, because they scrambled the signal somehow.
| acomjean wrote:
| We tried copying them too back when I was young. It didn't
| work. a friend got a "super vhs" and we figured, we'd try that.
| no dice. Not having the internet at the time, we couldn't
| figure it out.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System
|
| https://hackaday.com/2018/05/27/rolling-old-school-with-copy...
|
| not like audio tapes, where they were making cassette decks
| with for 2 tapes and 1 button copying (some had a 2x button to
| copy twice as fast..)
| mmastrac wrote:
| Media was brutally expensive. Tapes, CDs, DVDs. I used to pay $20
| for a single CD blank - it wasn't worth pirating a music CD that
| way.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am not interested in collecting VHS tapes because I wouldn't
| count an a tape from the 1980s playing successfully (not being
| destroyed.). I had a lot of trouble with tapes getting pulled in
| the 1990s...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I worked at a large VHS duplication facility in the 90s. The
| largest branch of my company had a facility that had 5000 VCRs.
| The facility I worked only had around 1200 VCRs. All of the
| equipment involved to make it all work was crazy, but cool to
| someone in the engineering side. Lots of video distribution amps
| were involved, but there were other pieces of gear that most
| people would never even know about. We had gear that would inject
| other signals/data into the video on the tape. The most obvious
| was Macrovision encoders, but we also could insert a code in the
| blanking that would tell us what shift the dub was created and
| which bank of decks were used to make the recording. Most dubs
| were created from proper masters going back from 3/4", 1", BCSP,
| Digibeta, D1, D2, etc. From time to time, we would also get
| VHS/SVHS "masters".
|
| The coolest thing to me was the high speed duplicators. VHS tape
| came to us on "pancakes" which were large spools of tape with
| thousands of feet of tape. The dub master was an 8-track type of
| system where you had the exact amount of VHS tape for your
| content that was spooled so that it wound back on itself with no
| rewinding. The company I worked for received a patent on this. At
| the beginning/end of the content were some cue tones. The high
| speed duplicator would run the blank stock from the pancake very
| very close to the tape from the 8-track wound "master" with both
| tapes passing through a magnetic field. This field would align
| the particles on the blank tape source. It was the closest to
| digital clone VHS could, and avoided generation loss in the dub.
| The high speed would run the entire pancake in a matter of
| minutes. IIRC, 45 minutes of content took 15 seconds in this
| system. The recorded pancake was then sent to a VHS tape loader.
| It would start at the end of the pancake and load the blank VHS
| cassette by rewinding directly from the pancake until it heard
| the cue tones where it would splice and move on to the next
| cassette. You could sometimes hear these cue tones at the
| beginning or end a tape depending on if the splice was pre/post
| cue tones.
|
| The same pancake could be sent directly to the loader as blank
| stock and a preset length of tape was loaded so that we could
| have inventory in 5m, 7m, 10m, 12m, 15m, 20m, 25m, increasing by
| multiples of 5m up to 180m tapes. Using the dubbed pancake cut
| exactly to content duration was the most efficient use of tape,
| but some dub orders did not need a large enough quantity to
| justify the dubbers. That's where the large number of VCRs were
| used to make dupes the old fashioned way and we would choose the
| tape length closest to the content duration.
| pkorzeniewski wrote:
| I've recently fixed a VCR from the 90s, connected it to a TV from
| the 80s (I collect retro stuff..), put some old VHS tape and I
| must say that the experience is really enjoyable - the whole
| mechanical operation and even the poor quality. VHS tapes have a
| distinct look and sound that can affect the perception of a
| movie, especially horrors seem more scary because the picture
| isn't as clean and sharp which helps hide any imperfections that
| would otherwise ruin the illusion of "realism". It's similar to
| vinyls - you wouldn't want to use it daily, but from time to time
| it's fun to do something "the analog way" :-)
| FillardMillmore wrote:
| There's actually a growing subgenre of horror videogames that
| utilize this aesthetic to great effect. It's mostly an "indie"
| thing right now, but heck, the most recent prominent example I
| can think of is Puppet Combo's 'Murder House' game, which
| looked and played like a '90s PS1 horror title, tank controls
| and all, and yet it was still scarier and spookier and than
| Resident Evil's latest triple A title.
|
| Here's the Steam page if anyone is interested in what it looks
| like:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1064460/Murder_House/
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I spent some money on a vhs recorder in the early nineties when I
| was a teenager. I mainly used it to record movies and then watch
| them later. I only owned a few tapes that I just reused
| endlessly. I kind of skipped dvds as a thing. I never bothered
| buying a separate player and I rarely used the one in my
| computer, when that was still a thing. I've not had a dvd or cd
| player for about five years now. My last computer that still had
| a slot for that died five years ago. Obsolete technology as far
| as I'm concerned long before that. It rarely got used.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| In me memory it was "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was released
| for less than $30 that blew the VHS movie market wide open. Maybe
| it was "Top Gun" or "E.T." though.
|
| It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
|
| Of course, I'm also old enough to remember seeing a single
| Japanese import of "Wings Greatest Hits" on compact disc for like
| $300 in a high-end audio store.
|
| And going further off topic, I remember that when the CD was
| released and cost around $20, the record companies assured us the
| price would drop to that of the vinyl record (which was often
| about $12 or so at that time).
|
| There have always been some sort of price games in the
| entertainment industry. When you have the rights to an artist,
| finding the same thing cheaper somewhere else just isn't an
| option.
|
| Well, except for piracy. I also remember a store in the college
| town I went to that rented records (and CD's?) and sold blank
| audio cassettes....
| SilasX wrote:
| >It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
|
| Yes! They touched on this in the Netflix documentary _The Last
| Blockbuster_ [1], where an old exec claims that any video copy
| displaced a huge number of movie viewings, so they came up with
| a high price to charge for them.
|
| It showed a picture of _The Empire Strikes Back_ with a $99
| price tag, which, if you assume it was 1982, would be like $290
| today.[2]
|
| According to the documentary, that only changed after someone
| bought the (expensive) videos and started renting them out,
| which led to a court case that affirmed the First Sale Doctrine
| and said you had the right to do that. Then eventually, the
| video rental stores got the studios to agree to "have all the
| copies you want, as long as we get a cut of the rental
| revenues".
|
| [1] About the history of Blockbuster, framed around the last
| surviving location, a franchisee (in Bend, Oregon) that pays a
| fee to keep using the brand.
|
| [2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
| ghaff wrote:
| Priced to rent vs. priced to buy. There was a period when
| priced to rent was the default but certain movies would get
| released (sometimes later) at a lower priced to buy price,
| especially things like animation that kids would want to
| watch over and over.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I definitely remember ads for some of the Disney animated
| movies saying they were "priced to own"
| jacobyoder wrote:
| I'm 99% certain it was Top Gun, and also, IIRC, it was because
| it had a Pepsi ad bundled with it before the movie (a somewhat
| groundbreaking move at the time). That subsidized the 'cost' of
| the movie on tape, reportedly.
|
| EDIT: looked a bit more. Diet Pepsi, not Pepsi, and it was
| 1986. Article I just found said it was only dropping the price
| from $29 to $26, so the bigger price drop was likely/possibly
| something else before that. My memory was that that Top Gun /
| Pepsi thing was the big deal that changed the VHS pricing, but
| it's been 30+ years so I'm likely misremembering...
|
| EDIT 2: maybe it was TG after all...
| https://www.everything80spodcast.com/how-the-top-gun-vhs-cha...
| ?
| andi999 wrote:
| Wasnt it sponsored by the airforce?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade also had a Pepsi ad on the
| VHS release
| thedougd wrote:
| Didn't Top Gun also break sound ground with Dolby Surround?
| Maybe I'm thinking of the Laser Disc or a re-release VHS? I
| recall it being some fantastic demo material for the time.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Don't really get what's meant to be surprising here. To me the
| heyday of VHS was clearly the 90's, not the 80's.
| mark-r wrote:
| Have you watched a VHS lately? The quality is horrible!
|
| These days you can go to your nearest Goodwill and load up on as
| many as you want for $1 apiece.
| detritus wrote:
| I distinctly recall seeing a VHS tape of 'The Goonies' retailing
| for PS64 in a video shop in the north of England sometime around
| '86, which blew my tiny little mind, as that may as well have
| been a million pounds.
|
| If memory serves, a video came out on video for hire 3 years
| after cinema release, then 2-3 years for video sale, then same
| again for network transmission. Or, perhaps those last two were
| the other way around? So long ago, goddamn.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I remember when my dad got our first video store membership. He
| was an engineer so it was early on. We had to join a membership
| club at the video store and the initial deposit to join was a a
| few hundred dollars to cover the costs if you absconded with
| tapes.
| silverfrost wrote:
| In the mid 80s I bought some 720KB 3.5" disks at the (what
| seemed) cheap price of PS25 for five. At the time that would have
| been around $40.
| lb1lf wrote:
| In Norway, there was a tax levied on blank media, as everybody
| supposed a significant portion of them would be used to make,
| ah, evaluation copies of copyrighted material. The tax income
| was put in a fund, from which copyright holders were
| compensated by market share (methinks).
|
| It so happens I have excellent memory for numbers; my preferred
| blank media in the late eighties/early nineties and their
| associated prices:
|
| Blank Fuji VHS tape, 240 minutes: NOK 89/ea (In today's money:
| $20) Maxell XLII-s 2x45 min cassette: NOK 65/ea ($14 today)
| 5.25" floppy, 3M: NOK 179 for pack of 10 ($40 today) 3.5"
| 1.44MB floppy, Esselte: NOK349 for pack of 10 ($80 today) CD-R
| (1996): NOK39/ea ($7.50 today)
|
| I'll hand Maxell that, though - the tapes I used to record live
| music on back in the nineties still sound excellent today, so
| for longevity, they're hard to beat!
| silverfrost wrote:
| They tried adding a tax in the UK but it never got there:
| http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/endless-
| cycl...
| iso1631 wrote:
| In the 1990s in the UK we got Star Trek episodes years behind
| America. Encounter at Farpoint for example came out in the US on
| 28 September 1987. In the UK it finally was broadcast on 26
| September 1990.
|
| It was available on VHS tape slightly earlier than that -- April
| 1990, but I was only 8 then.
|
| By the time DS9 season 6 came out though, I was 15 and had a TV
| and VHS machine in my bedroom. I was also on the internet and was
| unwilling to wait until
|
| A Time To Stand - first episode of Season 6 - came out in
| September 1997 in the US. In the UK it came out on VHS in Febuary
| 1998. From memory these were about PS12-14 for a 2 episode tape.
| They were finally broadcast (with adverts) in October 1998 on
| premium subscription service Sky One.
|
| I bought the first few in the season to complete the mini arc.
|
| Come season 7 I bought the lot, once ever 2 weeks, 13 tapes,
| about PS170, or about PS320 in today's money - $420 for a season,
| $16 per episode, 35 cents per minute.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| One thing the author doesn't do in this comparison is factor in
| the perceived technology value.
|
| While you can adjust for inflation to get the price of a VHS tape
| in 2022 dollars ($23) and say that it's high, to someone in the
| 1980s just having the ability to record a TV show or movie and
| watch it forever at home was considered a huge leap in
| technology, and well worth the value. Today, however, we take
| that for granted, which means that the inflation-adjusted price
| of a VHS tape seems absurdly high.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I remember getting a Tivo as a gift for my wife. (2001 maybe?).
| I'd hooked it up to the TV the night before and when she came
| downstairs in the morning I said "let me show you something!"
|
| I turned on some news channel and was trying to tell he about
| this. Something was 'newsworthy' on at that time, and she kept
| telling me "shh... hang on - I want to hear what he's saying!".
|
| I pressed the 'pause' button on the tivo remote and the screen
| froze. Then she froze, and slowly turned to me... and... had
| that look in her eyes that "the world's just changed". :)
| sndman wrote:
| I did a lot of taping of movies that were broadcast locally. Lots
| of documentaries on PBS were many hours long and broadcast over
| the span of several days, or once a week over the span of several
| weeks. The only way to see them, for me, was to schedule
| recording for the entire series.
|
| I had quite a collection of Woody Allen films on VHS only to
| watch then deteriorate before my eyes. It was sad to see them go.
| ben7799 wrote:
| All this stuff was made in high cost countries in the early 80s,
| manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by
| the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country.
|
| That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting
| cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except
| LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just
| didn't buy as much of it.
|
| We had a VCR really early cause my father worked at GE in the
| early 80s in a TV/VCR/Cable TV division. He got the VCR free I
| think at work. The only time we got new movies was when one of
| his co-workers would bring a VCR over and they would hook the two
| up and pirate movies. FWIW that early VCR lasted 20+ years.. it
| was built like a tank and I remember tearing it apart in the
| 2000s along with a broken Samsung from the early 2000s and
| comparing the two and it was pretty fascinating how things had
| changed.
|
| I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite
| Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of
| movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and
| Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
|
| Computer equipment was the same way, just about out of reach for
| most. My dad moved into network equipment and internet stuff by
| the mid 80s and we had a PC or Mac almost all the way through the
| 80s but it was always a loading dock discard that my father would
| grab from work before the computer went into the trash when they
| upgraded. I don't think he ever paid a dime for a computer till
| about 1993. When I went to college in 1995 I bought a laptop and
| it was an obscene purchase for an 18 year old, I could have
| bought a pretty nice used car instead.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star
| Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of
| movies_
|
| Yup. For me it was _Risky Business_ , _Fast Times at Ridgemont
| High_ , and probably a few others.
|
| Freshman year of college my roommate had a VCR. We learned that
| if we hooked up the VCR's RF output not to the TV input, but to
| the antenna, we could broadcast movies to the couple of
| neighboring rooms in the dorm.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| How does that work? Did you need to tune the tv to it?
| brimble wrote:
| > I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically
| recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small
| collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3
| SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
|
| Yeah, 80s/90s kid here and I think by the end of the VHS era we
| owned about a dozen movies on VHS, including the Star Wars
| trilogy and maybe half a dozen animated kids' movies, plus
| three or four movies taped off TV. Anything else had to be a
| rental (and we almost never rented new movies because they were
| super expensive to rent, and nb that "new" might mean "was in
| theaters within the last 5 years")
|
| I watched those ~15 total movies (commercial and recorded-off-
| TV combined) _a lot_ of times.
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| What laptop did you get in 95? I didn't even know laptops were
| a thing then.
| ska wrote:
| If you relax laptop to mean functionally portable, then
| reasonable commercial variations existed since the early 80s.
| Not with a clam-shell form factor, but designed to travel
| with you. By late 80s you had things that looked a bit like
| current laptops, e.g. NEC ultralight.
| mmphosis wrote:
| The Compaq "Portable" released March 1983; 39 years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable
|
| http://www.markrichards.com/Core_MemoryCollection/coreview/c.
| ..
| dboreham wrote:
| Laptops that look like today's laptops were well established
| by 1995. I still have a Compaq I got in 96 that still runs
| Windows 2000. I bought my first laptop in Akihabra in 1989,
| before they were widely available outside Japan. It also
| looked like today's laptops (was roughly the size of a
| notebook, uniform thickness, much thicker than its
| width/height), which was I recall a new thing that year. But
| long before that there was a gradual progression towards that
| "genesis-laptop" stage. There were "luggable" PCs that used
| display technology that wasn't LCD (gas discharge?). I
| remember those used by field personnel back to around 1986.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Was it a Toshiba? What were the specs?
| ben7799 wrote:
| Laptops were a thing well before 1995. Mine was a 486, I
| don't remember seeing any laptops before 386s but they
| existed and Apple had laptop/notebook machines in the pre-PPC
| era as well. But $3000-5000 was totally normal for laptops
| till the late 1990s.
|
| Technically they were already "notebooks" in 1995. Everything
| today counts as a Notebook I think if you consider the
| original definitions. Something like the "Macintosh Portable"
| would have been a "laptop" but not a "notebook" by the old
| school definitions. Modern definitions basically say a laptop
| is a big huge notebook with fans and optical drive whereas a
| "notebook" is basically an Ultrabook.
|
| In the 80s laptop and luggable were different things. The
| entire computer didn't fit into the screen + keyboard
| portions of a clamshell.
|
| When I went to college (for CS) in 1995 it was rare to have a
| personal laptop, slightly less rare to have a desktop PC. By
| 1997 all the incoming freshman at the school had IBM
| Thinkpads.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Then you don't know about the PowerBook 5300, arguably one of
| the worst computers ever made. We had one and though it never
| did set on fire, it was pretty crappy.
| mprovost wrote:
| I had an Apple PowerBook 520c in 1994. The "c" was for
| "color", they still had a greyscale version! One of the best
| laptops I've ever owned actually. It was the first laptop
| (from any manufacturer I think) with a trackpad.
| technofiend wrote:
| Oh check out the HP 110 from _1984!_. [1] I lusted heavily
| after them but could never afford one. There was an editor
| and spreadsheet included so it was fully functional. It was
| far lighter than later portable competition like Compaq and
| Kaypro luggables. Speaking from experience you didn 't
| really need or want to park a Compaq on your lap, just the
| keyboard.
|
| [1] https://vintage-laptops.com/en/hewlett-packard-
| hp-110-plus/
| mprovost wrote:
| Most of us in the 80s taped Star Wars off network TV (including
| ads) - they used to show it once a year. And for some reason
| you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the
| star background. When I was visiting my parents for Christmas
| last year we watched the Ewok Adventure that we had taped on
| VHS and the most interesting parts were the ads!
| canadianfella wrote:
| brimble wrote:
| > And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE
| fighters against the star background.
|
| You can in all versions from before the "THX remaster"
| release, AFAIK.
| mprovost wrote:
| They weren't there on the laserdisc release!
| ben7799 wrote:
| Our Superman 2 VHS was done that way with imperfect pressing
| of pause on the commercials.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically
| recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small
| collection of movies cause they were so expensive._
|
| Or you had parents like mine. They used a _lot_ of blank tapes,
| which held 6 hours worth of stuff. 3 movies each, that was. I
| think my parents saved up for it in the mid-80s.
|
| Back then, the cable companies used to run weekends with free
| HBO, Showtime, Disney (which was a premium channel back then)
| and so on. Hours of movies. Hours of looney tunes cartoons.
| Hours of old TV from Nick at Night, Nickelodeon's nighttime
| programming for adults. (So much I love Lucy and Dick van Dyke
| shows). Some still had commercials, but we didn't care. It was
| really nice during times without cable. I thnk they finally got
| rid of a lot of them about 15 years ago when their final VCR
| broke.
| CPLX wrote:
| Yup. My grandfather worked for Zenith for 50 years, and he
| lived in Chicago, and was the head of quality control for
| factories that made TV's that were literally _in_ Chicago.
|
| It seems inconceivable today but people in the US used to make
| consumer electronics. The fact that we don't any more was a
| catastrophic policy decision not some kind of law of nature.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > The fact that we don't any more was a catastrophic policy
| decision
|
| One effect of this is that the US and China are economically
| interconnected. It makes war a lot harder. It's why the EU is
| dragging its feet on oil and gas from Russia because that's
| the one Russian export they need.
| CPLX wrote:
| Yes and our supply chain is a house of cards that was bound
| to melt down one day because of a shock and finally did.
| And the industrial base of the country's interior has
| endured two generations of economic collapse leading to
| widespread misery and political upheaval.
|
| The free trade and industrial policy decisions of the 90's
| and early 2000's will go down in history as era-defining
| mistakes in this county's political history.
| rasz wrote:
| Direct assault on the entire American electronics industry as
| a form of revenge for ww2.
|
| Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television
| Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c
|
| "September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American
| television industry? The secret history of that strategy
| reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese
| government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..." http
| s://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3...
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan
| at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap"
| country.
|
| So US is still a cheap country?
| bluedino wrote:
| > That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to
| getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media
| normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was
| expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it.
|
| Not quite - the movie studios hadn't figured out they could
| sell way more tapes to consumers than video rental stores, so
| they lowered the prices to $19.95-24.95 in the late 80's.
| mickeyp wrote:
| > The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes
| are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic
| for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
|
| Ugh. Good riddance to VHS. I still have "fond" memories of
| sitting down to watch a movie only to have it interrupted half-
| way through for one of these reasons:
|
| 1. Tape's banjaxed and it's full of noise and other garbled junk
| due to bad recording, poor playback, or deterioration of the tape
| itself.
|
| Or, my personal favourite:
|
| 2. Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they
| grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later.
| Or it's half of your Uncle Fester's 48th birthday cake reveal,
| shakily recorded with a home camcorder.
|
| DVDs were the best thing to ever happen to the home movie
| entertainment in the late 90s.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Same thing for audio tapes. Inconvenient, sound like crap. At
| least, vinyl has something for it, it is also inconvenient and
| sounds like crap, but at least you don't have to rewind them,
| and all the noise and distortion it introduces can be
| considered pleasant and "warm".
|
| Really, there is a good reason all these things are gone except
| for nostalgic purposes.
|
| Video game cartridges are actually practical, they are
| essentially read-only SSDs! Some even include specialized co-
| processors so they are more than just storage. While they were
| made with the electronics of their time, they are in essence,
| much more modern than disks or tape.
| mattl wrote:
| Audio cassettes sound good if you used a quality tape.
| adamc wrote:
| If it hadn't deteriorated. Tape was not forever.
| tom_ wrote:
| "Bored comedy writer", says your HN bio. And yet here you
| are, with this post, doing your best work.
| mattl wrote:
| Meh.
|
| Try a type IV metal tape. A lot of very very shit tape
| types out there but a quality format will last and be
| good.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think vinyl sounding terrible is bandwidth limiter or
| something missing in amplifier. Above 10 grands they sound
| not much different against high-res digital audio.
| tiahura wrote:
| Perhaps they're not using proper gold connectors.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yeah they should be using prefabulated ammulite
| casing...jokes aside vinyl shouldn't sound worse than CD
| et al at all. They just cost a halfway fortune to get
| working.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Does anybody else remember McDonalds selling inexpensive VHS
| copies of popular movies like "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" with an
| additional food purchase, back when movies still cost a
| fortune?
|
| >McDonald's Corp. will... sell Dances With Wolves for a bargain
| price.
|
| As part of a special holiday promotion, McDonald's will sell
| the Oscar-winning movie for $7.99 with the purchase of a
| sandwich - at a time when video stores are selling it for its
| original list price, $99.98.
|
| https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1992-11-29-92112...
|
| They sold several movies before "priced to own" movies became
| mainstream.
|
| https://letterboxd.com/travissmcclain/list/mcdonalds-vhs-pro...
| pram wrote:
| Yup my parents used this quite a bit, I didn't realize it was
| such a good deal though. I also ended up having a lot of
| Ronald McDonald cartoons lol
| skeeterbug wrote:
| Don't forget you had to re-wind the entire tape or get charged
| extra for the rental! We had a dedicated re-winder next to our
| TV at one point.
| mprovost wrote:
| Was it in the shape of a race car?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| How kind of you.
| david422 wrote:
| > Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they
| grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it
| later.
|
| Did that really happen though? VHS tapes had a plastic tab that
| could be removed to prevent recording. Any commercial VHS tape
| would not allow that. So that would only be happening if you
| recorded some movie and someone else used the same tape to
| record their show. Not really a VHS problem.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Copying was rampant, and recording off of TV (including
| movies) too.
|
| People wouldn't bother with the tab, because they kept
| recording over stuff, dozens or 100s of times.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Or discover the "game" ran long and you only got the first
| ten minutes of The Simpsons!
| carride wrote:
| If the missing plastic was missing, you only needed to cover
| with tape. Then it was able to be used for a new recording.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yeah, I remember this distinctly. VHS tapes used to be
| really, really expensive. So even though they were $25 in
| inflation adjusted dollars by the 90s, people had already
| been used to reusing the same tape until it died, because the
| one they are currently using was like $80 (inflation
| adjusted) new.
|
| It was like buying a new slow cooker every time you need one.
| It's not that expensive, but it seems wasteful non-the-less.
|
| Media was ephemeral back then.
| skylanh wrote:
| TV shows were scheduled for your local stations and there may
| be an alternate channel that would have an echo or
| rebroadcast schedule.
|
| If you wanted to watch "your show" you had to either have
| someone record it, or record it yourself. There were even
| VCRs that could be programmed to start recording at a certain
| point for a specific duration.
|
| In all of humanity's many combinations of people, situations,
| and outcomes, yes, this has happened hundreds of thousands of
| times.
|
| It's literally a meme that "oh! no, don't watch that one--
| that has our sex tape in the middle".
| robocat wrote:
| > There were even VCRs that could be programmed to start
| recording at a certain point for a specific duration.
|
| Although programming VCRs correctly required skill, because
| the user interfaces were so abysmal.
|
| It was a meme that parents couldn't do it.
|
| For younger readers: there was a single small display on
| the early programmable VCRs that could show a few digits,
| which needed to sequentially program the slot, channel,
| start time, and end time. Years later there were LCD
| screens on the remote, although they were still cryptic,
| and they didn't always synchronise correctly to the VCR, so
| results were unpredictable. Even later there were on-screen
| user interfaces (which were still extremely quirky).
| Reading a manual was definitely required at first.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >Did that really happen though?
|
| Yes. All the freakin time. :)
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| Everytime I rented a video on DVD, they were scratched. Renting
| DVDs was always an uncertain experience of not knowing whether
| I would see the whole movie or not. Often times entire scenes
| would just drop. Great technology, horrible implementation.
|
| VHS was big, clunky, complicated and reliable. I never doubted
| it. Sure the quality was not as good, but if you were watching
| the movie for the first time, you didn't care. It was
| consistent crap quality and I much preferred it over DVD.
| tombert wrote:
| I feel like this is a rose-colored memory. I had VCRs eat and
| destroy multiple VHS tapes to a point where they became
| unwatchable.
|
| DVDs could get scratched, but usually you didn't have to
| worry about the _player_ killing the movie, and generally
| even when the movie got scratched it would still work for me.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I recall it depended a lot on what DVD player you got. Some
| would play through scratched DVDs merely skipping over the
| bad parts, others would stutter through the bad parts while
| some would just stop. Interestingly enough it was often the
| cheaper Chinese brands that would handle the bad DVDs
| better than the more expensive brands (but not always!).
| Luckily the players I had were always pretty good so I
| could play pretty much any DVD movie without any trouble.
| mywittyname wrote:
| By like 2002, DVDs became so cheap to order ($2-$8 per)
| that most movie rental places would replace them if a user
| reported one as scratched. It often paid for itself in a
| single rental.
|
| VHS tapes were never that cheap.
| gkop wrote:
| Article I believe is saying _commercial pre-recorded VHS
| movies_ are collectible. Re: point 2, such tapes _should not_
| have a copy protection tab, so a properly functioning VCR
| _should_ prevent this scenario. Just mentioning lest people get
| the impression VHS simply didn't address this case. Cf.
| https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/record...
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| You just put tape on the corners and it's writable again
| gkop wrote:
| Which elevates the transgression from plausible simple
| mistake to premeditated destruction. There's not an issue
| with the technology here, great grandparent commenter has
| an issue with bad human behavior (notwithstanding faulty
| cassette manufacturing and defective VCRs, of course).
| dustymcp wrote:
| This right here, my cousin worked at a video store which
| usually threw out cassettes not deemed working order and we
| took those and overwrote them with other newer movies. Was
| pretty awesome having 2 vhs on top of each other then
| pressing play and record and watch the movie and save it at
| the same time, the future was limitless at that point!
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Was pretty awesome having 2 vhs on top
|
| 2 VCRs on top of each other? Or are you trying to Kleenex
| the video tape system so that regardless if it was a tape
| or a machine, it's just VHS?
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Sort of reminds me of the IT guy at my high school who
| was shipped a crate of AOL floppies (I guess to
| distribute to the kids) who just moved the tabs and
| slapped a new label on them when he needed one.
| bluedino wrote:
| My VHS story goes back to...1986?
|
| We went to Fretter appliance. My dad shelled out $700 for the
| player and $80 for a copy of _Purple Rain_
|
| My dad only made $12,000 a year back then so I'm not sure how
| smart of a purchase that was.
| vivegi wrote:
| I am from India and VCRs came into my life in the mid to late
| 80s. Initially, VCRs were so damn expensive (because they were
| all imported) and you would rent them for a weekend and a few
| films. The whole family, friends and neighbors would gather for a
| 'weekend binge watch' before binge watching even became a thing.
| It wasn't uncommon to rent 8 to 10 films and watch them back to
| back.
|
| When I got to high school, we had domestic electronics companies
| manufacturing VCRs in India and we bought one at our home. A
| video rental store in our neighborhood had an excellent
| collection of English language films and a rental would cost Rs.
| 10 ($1 US ~ Rs. 13 to Rs. 16 those years). I would spend hours
| going through their collection and reading the synopsis on the
| jacket/sleeve before picking a couple of films to watch.
|
| DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming today is better but the VCR/VHS nostalgia
| is a lot more than just the tech due to the lived experience of
| that era.
| adventured wrote:
| > The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes
| are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic
| for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
|
| They're an overrated collectible. There's no great quality-of-
| media benefit to VHS tapes, versus say the audio record market
| (where there is an argument in terms of the audio experience).
|
| People are in fact quite nostalgic for movies, not VHS tapes. The
| author is confused on the difference.
|
| Nobody is buying Ikari Warriors 1/2/3 (old NES games) for $50 on
| the PS5 today; but people have been buying Top Gun on DVD, then
| Blu-ray, then 4K, and paying retail prices to do it. They do it
| because there has generally been a quality increase. The rare
| exception is a few hyper popular games from the past that eg end
| up on Steam (Final Fantasy 1/2/3/etc games, or Age of Empires) or
| on a Nintendo repackaging hardware device.
|
| Most NES video games for example were not endlessly repackaged
| with each generation of video game machines. The companies make
| new games, the old games largely stay in the past (in part due to
| the vast improvement in the quality of the games, the graphics,
| the size of the games, etc). The same is not true of movies. I
| can buy a superior copy of the movies The Color of Money or Heat
| on disc today vs the same movies on VHS, and that's why nobody
| cares about collecting VHS tapes, the same exact movies are
| reproduced at often dramatically better quality vs the past.
| They're not merely reproduced, it's typically a superior offering
| (certainly moving from shoddy VHS tapes to modern discs, when
| they're done well by the studio, is a vastly superior consumer
| experience).
| wazoox wrote:
| My son once grabbed a huge crate of ditched VHS on the
| sidewalk, filled with 80s action movies (complete Stallone,
| VanDamme, Schwartzenegger etc). He made a lot of 80s-movies-
| watching with his friends from these VHS. They loved the
| experience of watching 80s movies on 80s technology apparently
| :)
| eggy wrote:
| Ah, memories. I took job in 1985 at Skyline Video near the World
| Trade Center at Trinity Place. We sold videos, blanks, and rented
| movies and big, big VCRs that people would rent for the weekend
| ($80 or $100 IIRC) or a night($60). Andy was the owner, and Jim
| and Howie were his partner and manager. If any of you recall
| anything about that store, or the workers, I'd love to hear about
| it. Good times watching videos after work, bringing home a VCR,
| if available, to my family with three videos! We were at the
| poverty line for many years, so this was a very special treat.
| Living large in the 80s!
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Each purchase of a movie should have came with a license to
| exchange it for the same movie on new media as it became
| available. Like pirating a copy of a movie you already own
| shouldn't be illegal.
| dhosek wrote:
| The first movie I owned on VHS was one of the Indiana Jones
| movies. It was either free or super cheap with the purchase of a
| meal at McDonald's in the 90s. Most of my VHS movie collection
| though was taped off the air or from cable broadcasts. When I
| cleared out my VHS stuff in the 00s, there was absolutely no
| market for it and I ended up dropping off a box of tapes at a
| dumpster at CalState Long Beach.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Anyone remember Famous Video in the Denver area?
| aghilmort wrote:
| dad took us kids to buy first VHS ever as present for mom; was in
| $90-$110 range
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