Home video
Home video is recorded media sold or rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD and Blu-ray. In a different usage, "home video" refers to amateur video recordings, also known as home movies.
Released in 1978, LaserDisc is another home video format, which never managed to gain widespread use on North American and European retail markets due to high cost of the players and their inability to record TV programs, although it retained some popularity among videophiles and film enthusiasts during its lifespan; the format had greater prevalence in some regions of Southeast Asia such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia where it was better supported. Film titles were released in LD format until 2001, production of LD players ceased in 2009.
The home video business distributes films, television series, telefilms and other audiovisual media to the public in the form of videos in various formats, either bought or rented and then watched privately in purchasers' homes. Most theatrically released films are now released on digital media, replacing the largely obsolete videotape medium., the Video CD format remained popular in Asia. DVDs have been gradually losing popularity since the late 2010s and early 2020s, when streaming media became mainstream for the audiences, with most media consumers in urban areas globally having domestic Internet access.
History
As early as 1906, various film entrepreneurs began to consider the business potential of home viewing of films, and in 1912, both Edison and Pathé started selling film projectors for home use. Because making release prints was very expensive—as of 2005, the cost of making a release print was still at least $1,000—early projector owners rented films by mail directly from the projector manufacturers. The Edison company's business model was fundamentally flawed because it had started with phonographs and did not differentiate home viewing from home listening. Edison exited the home viewing business in 1914; Pathé remained active a few years longer, but exited at some point during World War I.After the quick failures of these early attempts at home viewing, most feature films were essentially inaccessible to the public after their original theatrical runs. For most of the 20th century, the idea that ordinary consumers could own copies of films and watch them at their convenience in their own homes "was beyond the grasp of reasonable expectations." Some very popular films were given occasional theatrical re-releases in urban revival houses and the screening rooms of a few archives and museums. Beginning in the 1950s, most could be expected to be broadcast on television, eventually. During this era, television programs normally could only be viewed at the time of broadcast. Viewers were accustomed to the fact that there was no easy way to record television shows at home and watch them whenever desired.
In 1924, Kodak invented 16 mm film, which became popular for home use, and then later developed 8 mm film. After that point, the public could purchase a film projector for one of those film formats and rent or buy home-use prints of some cartoons, short comedies, and brief "highlights" reels edited from feature films. The Super 8 film format, introduced in 1965, was marketed for making home movies, but it also boosted the popularity of show-at-home films. Eventually, longer, edited-down versions of feature films were issued, which increasingly came in color and with a magnetic soundtrack, but in comparison to modern technologies, film projection was still quite expensive and difficult to use. As a result, home viewing of films remained limited to a small community of dedicated hobbyists willing and able to invest large amounts of money in projectors, screens, and film prints, and it therefore made little revenue for film companies.
In 1956, Ampex pioneered the first commercially practical videotape recording system. The Ampex system, though, used reel-to-reel tape and physically bulky equipment not suitable for home use.
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 Betamax and VHS home videocassette formats were introduced, respectively, in 1975 and 1976, but several more years and significant reductions in the prices of both equipment and videocassettes were needed before both formats started to become widespread in households.
The first company to duplicate and distribute feature films from major film studios on home video was Magnetic Video. Magnetic Video was established in 1968 as an audio and video duplication service for professional audio and television corporations in Farmington Hills, Michigan. After Betamax was launched in the United States in 1976, Magnetic Video chief executive Andre Blay wrote letters to all the major film studios offering to license the rights to their films. Near the end of 1977, Magnetic Video entered into a first-of-its-kind deal with 20th Century Fox. Magnetic Video agreed to pay Fox a royalty of $7.50 per unit sold and a guaranteed annual minimum payment of $500,000 in exchange for nonexclusive rights to 50 films, which had to be at least two years old and had already been broadcast on network television.
Home video was born, initially, as a rental business. Film studios and video distributors assumed that the overwhelming majority of consumers would not want to buy prerecorded videocassettes, but would merely rent them. They felt that virtually all sales of videocassettes would be to video rental stores and set prices accordingly. According to Douglas Gomery, studio executives thought that the handful of consumers actually interested in purchasing videocassettes in order to watch them again and again would be similar to the small community of film buffs who for decades had willingly paid hundreds of dollars to purchase release prints. Therefore, in 1977, Magnetic Video originally priced its videocassettes at $50 to $70 each—a princely sum at a time when the average price of an American movie ticket was $2.23—and sold them only to wholesalers capable of handling a minimum order of $8,000. When the American home video market suddenly took off like a rocket, Fox bought Magnetic Video in 1978 and turned the company into its home video division.
The home video market grew rapidly along with the widespread acquisition of affordable videocassette recorders by the majority of households during the 1980s. For example, in 1978, the total number of VCRs purchased to date at wholesale in the United States was only 402,000, the average wholesale price of a VCR was $811, and the percentage of television-owning households with a VCR was unknown but probably just above zero. By 1992, the respective numbers for each of these categories were 105,502,000, $239, and 75.6%.
During the 1980s, video rental stores became a popular way to watch home video. Video rental stores are physical retail businesses that rent home videos such as movies and prerecorded TV shows. Typically, a rental shop conducts business with customers under conditions and terms agreed upon in a rental agreement or contract, which may be implied, explicit, or written. Many video rental stores also sell previously viewed movies and/or new unopened movies. 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 shift to home viewing radically changed revenue streams for film companies, because home renting provided an additional window of time in which a film could make money. In some cases, films that performed only modestly in their theater releases went on to sell significantly well in the rental market.
During the 1980s, video distributors gradually realized that many consumers did want to build their own video libraries, and not just rent, if the price was right. Rather than sell a few thousand units at a wholesale price of $70 into the rental channel, video distributors could sell hundreds of thousands of units at a wholesale price of $15-20 into the retail "sell-through" channel. By "slashing prices and making up in volume what it loses in margin", The New York Times reported in 1983, Paramount Pictures had two of the top three best-selling videotapes and six of the top 20 rentals.
The "ultimate accelerant" for the rise of the "sell-through" home video market was the development of children's home video. The pre-1980s conventional wisdom that consumers had no interest in watching the same films again and again at home turned out to be entirely wrong with respect to children. Many harried parents discovered that it was a good investment to pay $20 to purchase a videocassette that could reliably keep their children riveted to the television screen for over an hour—and not just one time, but many, many times. The Walt Disney Company recognized that its flagship animation studio's family-friendly films were superbly positioned to conquer the home video market, and through its home video division, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the company did just that during the 1980s and 1990s. This spectacular success "catapulted the head of Disney's video division, Bill Mechanic, into executive stardom." In 1994, Mechanic left Disney to become head of Fox Filmed Entertainment. Another executive, Bob Chapek, would later ascend through the ranks of Disney's home video division to become chief executive officer of the entire company in 2020, and for that reason was called "the home entertainment industry's single biggest success story."
Special-interest video production
Until the mid-1980s, home video was dominated by feature film theatrical releases such as The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca from major film studios. At that time, not many people owned a VCR, and those who did tended to rent rather than buy videos. The late 1980s saw the emergence of a great many small companies which specialized in producing special-interest home videos, also known as "nontheatrical programming" and "alternative programming". These new video programs differed radically from earlier forms of video content in that they were never intended for theatrical exhibition nor television broadcasting. They were created specifically for niche audiences in the so-called "sell-through" channel, to be purchased at retail or ordered directly by consumers and viewed exclusively as home videos. It was pointed out at the time thatSpecial-interest video increased to larger audiences the number of topics, including "...dog handling videos, back pain videos and cooking videos", which were not previously thought of as marketable. Next, even "golf and skiing tapes* started selling. Contemporary sources noted, "new technology has changed the territory" of the home video market.