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. If you wanted to see it again, well, tough: Buy the movie novelization. VHS changed all of this.
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.
If we look back at the history of home movies, most people didn't even have the ability to make them until around the 1980s--that is, until a magical device called the VHS tape made recording home videos easy, fun, and basically foolproof. That doesn't mean there weren't video formats before the VHS.
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.
History of Home Video | VHS | Betamax | DVD | Blu-ray
How did people in the 1920s watch movies?
Cinema in the 1920s
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.
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.
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 VCR was still a popular appliance in most households (about three quarters of them in 1991) and rentals and purchase of videotapes were big business - much larger than sales of movie theater tickets.
FIRST FILM EVER RELEASED ON VHS: THE YOUNG TEACHER
The South Korean drama, The Young Teacher, was the first film to be released for home VHS consumption. Considering the first VCRs were released in 1976, it makes perfect sense that the first movies would also accompany it in the same year.
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.
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. By the 1980s, cable networks like HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime offered premium programming, including big movies available a year after theatrical release, with a paid subscription.
By the mid-1970s, it was clear that videotape was the future of home theater movies. And in 1975, Sony released the Betamax as the latest videotape format. A better (and smaller) tape alternative to U-Matic, Betamax was a technological marvel of the time.
The last VCR was manufactured in 2016 by Funai Electric, the last remaining VHS player manufacturer after all the other major tech companies had stopped making them. They announced they were ceasing production that year due to poor sales, and there have been no new VCRs on the market since.
VHS tape life expectancy varies from one VHS tape to the next. In general, VHS deterioration of 10–20% occurs over a period of 10 to 25 years. Better quality tapes have a slightly longer lifespan, as do VHS tapes that have been kept in a climate-controlled setting.
Dust off your VHS player, because tapes seem to be making a collector comeback. Just like vinyl records, VHS tapes have been a hot commodity in the realm of collectors of physical media. According to Screen Rant, in June 2022 a collector paid $75,000 for a VHS copy of Back to the Future.
“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.
Many of the films of the '90s incorporated new technologies and tackled issues that were previously thought of as taboo on film. It was another golden decade for Hollywood, as it seemed like there were more and more classic dramas, comedies, action thrillers, and documentaries coming out every year.
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.
Color added a sense of spectacle to films — that's why so many of the musicals and Biblical epics from the 1930s to the 1950s are brightly colored. Black and white, which remained less expensive, was often used for more serious films or those that weren't thought to benefit from the spectacle.
In the mid-1970s, videotape became the first truly practical home-video format with the development of videocassettes, which were far easier to use than tape reels.
The Hopalong Cassidy films were usually edited to fit, with commercials, into a one hour time slot, and Network television began televising these edited Hopalong films on June 24, 1949. We believe these Hopalong Cassidy films may have been the first series of films shown on TV.
What invention changed the way people watch movies in the 90s?
8. The DVDs (1996) The replacement for VHS, DVD (short for "digital video disc") was developed in 1995 and released in 1996. In addition, the world's first DVD player, the Toshiba SD-3000, instantly became popular.
