In the 20th century, if people wanted to watch the latest flick, they had to buy a ticket at a theater to watch it. TV films were not as prominent back then as they are now. If a large group of friends wanted to watch a movie, they would book an entire row to share their experience during a film.
Before VHS, the only way to watch a movie or TV show was to watch it when it was available. For a movie, that meant seeing it in the theater when it was released – and maybe once more when it got a TV showing.
How did people watch movies before streaming services?
Another way people were able to watch movies at home was through their cable or satellite television provider. Pay-per-view was available as early as the 1960s when you could call in and pay to watch a sports program on a private channel.
Dedicated home cinemas were called screening rooms at the time and were outfitted with 16 mm or even 35 mm projectors for showing commercial films. These were found almost exclusively in the homes of the very wealthy, especially those in the movie industry.
The first was that you could record stuff from the TV (albeit 13 years late…) and rewatch it whenever you felt like it, the other was that you could go to a shop, rent a film and bring it home on a Friday night to watch with the family.
As the popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the early part of the decade, movie "palaces" capable of seating thousands sprang up in major cities. A ticket for a double feature and a live show cost 25 cents.
Drive-ins gained immense popularity 20 years later during the 1950s and '60s with the Baby Boomer generation. There were over 4,000 drive-ins throughout the U.S., and most were in rural areas.
Patrons sat at tables and watched "flickers" projected onto a screen of muslin or bed sheets while a single musician played frenzied interludes, known as "the Russian hurries," on piano or violin. The first movie houses were dubbed "nickelodeons," combining the price of admission with the Greek word for theater.
“When the movie production companies started selling movies on tape, we could buy them to watch at home, on our VCRs. We could also rent movies at Blockbuster (yes, they went out of business) to watch at home. It was a little bit like borrowing a book from the library, but we had to pay to borrow them.
They would sometimes show movies on TV. Also, some old movies would come back and make the rounds of theaters again. Clubs could rent out movies and show them if they were willing to sign the appropriate agreements and pay the fees and had a theater to show it.
Betamax (also known as Beta, as in its logo) is a consumer-level analog recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video, commonly known as a video cassette recorder. It was developed by Sony and was released in Japan on May 10, 1975, followed by the US in November of the same year.
You may think, but the reality is that life before the Internet was also good! There weren't social networks, but there were excuses to go out and see your friends in the flesh. There weren't search engines, but there were libraries where you could meet interesting people and learn from each other.
How did people entertain themselves before movies?
People found entertainment and information through various means such as reading, listening to the radio, attending live performances, and spending quality time with friends and family.
There used to be things called books, specifically encyclopedias, buildings with books (called a library), and for those more tech-savvy, there was the mighty Encarta '95. Those were dark times when you needed to search and read through reams of text for the information you're after, and how things have changed.
In 1967, you would have paid just $1.20 to see a movie, but in today's prices, that same ticket would cost you $8.76 -- $0.11 more than the current average ticket price!
In the 1980s, video rental stores rented films in both the VHS and Betamax formats, although most stores stopped using Betamax tapes when VHS won the format war late in the decade.
"The decline of the drive-in was directly related to the movement away from Main Street America and towards the mall society, where convenience, times, weather and the idea of 'all-inclusive' became the popular way to enjoy a night out, pushing away the classic night out at the drive-in," Stefanopoulos elaborated.
By 1910 the motion picture industry had run through a series of experimental terms and words. However, all those names turned out to be awkward misfits, and simpler terms like “moving picture” and “picture show” had crept into common usage.
How often did Americans go to the movies in the 1920s?
During the 1920s, movie attendance soared. By the middle of the decade, 50 million people a week went to the movies - the equivalent of half the nation's population. In Chicago, in 1929, theaters had enough seats for half the city's population to attend a movie each day.
It's true that in the first decades of cinema movies were shorter, they were on average 90 minutes long in early 1930s and reached 100–110 minutes in mid-'50s.
Did people watch movies during the Great Depression?
Even at the Depression's depths 60 to 80 million Americans attended the movies each week, and, in the face of doubt and despair, films helped sustain national morale. Although the movie industry considered itself Depression- proof, Hollywood was no more immune from the Depression's effects than any other industry.
As the 1950s began, studios were making fewer but more-expensive films, and innovative technology became a core strategy to get audiences back into theaters. Spectacular imagery and sound, it was believed, would dramatically differentiate the cinema experience from the black-and-white boxed image in the living room.
