VHS: Say It Ain’t So

VHS, long the format of choice for home entertainment, is now all but forgotten, and most retailers are not stocking VHS tapes in the lucrative Christmas selling season. The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation videogame consoles hastened its final decline. I spent much of my hard-earned money in the late 80′s and 90′s renting VHS tapes — so I shed a tear at this news. The more interesting point in this news is the velocity fo technological change. While the VHS format lasted for 25 years — it is unclear how long the DVD will last….Wal-Mart, who accounts for a staggering 40% of all DVD’s sold in America, is betting on movie downloads over the internet and is investing heavily to ensure it is a major player. Who thinks we will be playing taps for DVD’s in the next 5 years?

Entertainment-industry magazine Variety recently published a tongue-in-cheek obituary for the VHS format. “After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes,” according to the report, written by Diane Garrett. “The format was 30 years old. No services are planned.”
“VHS was first introduced in 1976 by Japanese manufacturer JVC. After winning a format war against the rival tape format Betamax in the early 1980s, VHS became wildly popular through the 1980s and ’90s. VHS hit its peak with “The Lion King,” which sold more than 30 million videocassettes in the U.S. Its popularity waned in the late 1990s, after the introduction of the DVD in 1997. By 2003, DVD had officially surpassed VHS in popularity. By 2006, few movies were even being released on VHS.

Now, with the advent of such “next-generation” DVD players as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, and the growing popularity of digital video recorders, video on demand (VOD) and TiVo, VHS is largely irrelevant. A few titles, mostly children’s programs, are still released on VHS, but most stores have either removed videotapes or relegated them to a corner of the display area. There are still some VHS players to be found, but most of them are combo DVD/VCR units or ones with DVD recorders so people can convert their old videotapes to DVD. “VHS is survived by a child, DVD,” the Variety article goes on to say, “and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, minidiscs and laserdiscs.”