When did VCRs get popular? It’s hard to give an exact date. I was alive in the 1980s, and it was a gradual thing. But I will argue that 1984 is as good of a starting point as any, because 1984 was the year VCRs became legal. Yes, part of the problem with VCR adoption was the question of whether they violated copyright law. But the Supreme Court settled that on January 17, 1984.
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. – the Betamax case
Sony released its Betamax recorder in May 1975. Two large movie studios, Universal and Disney, sued Sony in 1976. They wanted to hold Sony and its distributors liable for any copyright violations consumers committed with their VCRs. In 1978, the district court ruled for Sony, but Sony lost on appeal. Sony then appealed to the Supreme Court, who ruled January 17, 1984, deciding in Sony’s favor.
The decision was not along ideological lines the way we’ve come to expect them today. Conservatives John Stevens, Warren Burger, and Sandra Day O’Connor were joined by liberals William Brennan and Byron White in the majority ruling for Sony. Dissenters included conservatives Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist along with liberal Thurgood Marshall.
Fred Rogers, the legendary children’s television host, argued for Sony that audiences should be able to record television so they could watch shows at their convenience, rather than having to plan their schedule around the TV schedule.
When did the VCR become popular?
VCR sales increased every year from 1980 to 1988. In June 1984, The New York Times wrote that analysts expected 15 million households to have a VCR by the end of the year. There were 86.8 million households in the United States in 1985. The cover of the December 24, 1984 issue of Time featured VCRs, calling them Santa’s hottest gift, a magic box creating a revolution.
VCR sales increased from there. I’m not convinced legality would have stopped adoption, but manufacturers fearing liability were hesitating to get into the market or to lower prices. With the question of legality out of the way in 1984, more companies entered the market and prices started decreasing. As prices decreased, adoption increased. VCR sales continued increasing year over year until 1988. By November 1988, 62 percent of US households owned a VCR. 62 percent is well into the late majority, so if you know much about marketing, it’s no surprise sales started declining after 1988.
So you could probably argue any year between 1980 and 1988 as when the VCR became popular. But the strongest argument would be somewhere in the middle, preferably the range of 1984 to 1986. If you’re old enough to remember 2002 and 2003 as the years it seemed like everyone bought a DVD player, I can tell you 1984-1986 felt similar, except it was VCRs that time around.
What the VCR’s heyday looked like
Commercial videocassettes were still very expensive in the mid 1980s, so renting movies on the weekends was a common family ritual. Recording movies off cable TV was common. Cable TV saw the VCR as a threat, so one way cable channels combatted that was by showing a wider variety of movies than they had before, so if nothing else, households would keep their cable subscriptions so they could record movies to build a library.
Recording favorite TV programs was also common. If you missed an episode, you might trade copies with someone who had recorded that episode.
Copying tapes was possible if you had two VCRs, but the generational degradation from copying tape to tape was noticeable. A program recorded from TV looked better than a copied tape.
Commercial tapes started decreasing in price around 1986, making it more practical for households to build a library of legitimately purchased tapes.
The bloodbath the movie industry feared never happened. Selling tapes to rental stores and, later, directly to consumers proved more profitable than putting movies in theaters. Rather than it being a matter of whether the consumer electronics industry or the movie industry would win, both of them benefited from the popularity of the VCR.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
The law moved more slowly here in the UK; videotaping TV shows in England & Wales only finally became legal in 1989. But thousands of people were doing it anyway for many years prior to that!
One weird forgotten aspect of the VCR era in the UK was the “video nasty” phenomenon of the early 80s. These were low budget horror or violent movies which entered circulation because videos weren’t originally within the remit of the British Board of Film Censorship.
Predictably there was moral outrage amongst certain sections of the media and various do-gooder campaigners – “think of the children, they might watch this!” – and the legal loophole was duly closed. But all of this passed me by as my family didn’t buy a VCR until around 1990.
A high-school friend had a VCR in 1978 that he used recording over-the-air TV shows. I was so jealous. He was way ahead of his time
My wife and I were able to afford our first VHS VCR in 1985. It was a major expense for us but allowed us to record TV shows and watch them when we wanted…it was a major lifestyle change for us at the time. A few years later our infant son jammed all my wife’s jewellery inside it. I had to take it apart to remove it all.
For years we had a complicated system for recording and archiving shows to watch later. Woe to the person who accidentally taped over beloved episodes by accident.