The Doomed Effort to Make Videos Go Vinyl(atlasobscura.com) |
The Doomed Effort to Make Videos Go Vinyl(atlasobscura.com) |
Cassettes won in part because they were a lot smaller and could eventually play stereo, and 8-track tapes are a terrible, fragile kludge (my family used to make them back when pirating them was legal, as long as you paid ASCAP ... or tried to pay them, they never accepted the money my father set aside).
And that's just side one; halfway through you gotta get up off the couch and flip it over and do the whole gauntlet again.
I got the strong impression that DVDs were sell-through, a market I think Disney pioneered. So maybe video rental wasn't so important for DVDs, but I don't know.
You are of course right that recording was a killer app for VHS, lots of time shifting ... although, hasn't VHS died without most people replacing it with recording to hard disks? I'm not sure TiVo got big enough, but I don't know.
As brudgers points out in his reply in this subthread, recording got big enough to worry the content holders such that they imposed DRM on DVDs and Blu-ray, but it's not clear their fears are realistic. Certainly the cracking of DVD DRM didn't stop production of them.