Home video

As early as 1906, various film-industry entrepreneurs began to discuss the potential of home viewing of films, and in 1912, both Edison and Pathé started selling film projectors for home use.[3] Because making release prints was (and still is) very expensive, early home projector owners rented films by mail from the projector manufacturer.[3] Edison's business model was fundamentally flawed because the company had started with phonographs and did not understand that home viewing is fundamentally different from home listening.[3] Edison ended its home viewing business in 1914, while Pathé lingered a bit longer, but exited at some point during World War I.[3]

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.[4] Some very popular films were given occasional theatrical re-releases in urban revival houses and the screening rooms of a handful of archives and museums. Beginning in the 1950s, most could be expected to turn up 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 TV shows at home and watch them whenever desired.

In 1924, Kodak invented 16-mm film, which became popular for home use,[3] and then later developed 8-mm film.[5] After that point, consumers 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. In the case of the 16-mm format, most of these were available with an optical soundtrack, and even some entire feature films in 16-mm could be rented or bought. The 8-mm films almost never ran longer than 10 minutes and only a few were available with a magnetic soundtrack late in the life of the format. The Super 8 film format, introduced in 1965,[6] 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.[5] As a result, home viewing of films remained the province of dedicated film buffs willing and able to invest thousands of dollars in projectors, screens, and film prints,[5] and was only a tiny fraction of the film industry.[3]

In 1956, Ampex pioneered the first commercially practical videotape recording system.[5] The Ampex system, though, used reel-to-reel tape and physically bulky equipment not suitable for home use.[5]

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[7] but several more years and dramatic reductions in the prices of both equipment and videocassettes were needed before both formats started to become widespread in households.

Initially, film studios and video distributors assumed that consumers would not want to buy prerecorded videocassettes, but merely rent them. They also felt that virtually all of the sales would be to video rental stores and set prices accordingly. The shift to home viewing also changed the movie industry's revenue streams, because home renting created 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 strongly into the rental market (e.g., cult films).

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, prerecorded TV shows, video game discs, and other content. 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 dropped Betamax tapes when VHS won the format war late in the decade.

Movie boxes on display at a video rental store

During the 1980s, film distributors slowly came to understand that many people did want to build their own video libraries, and not just rent, if the price were right, and in turn, a title that had sold a few hundred copies at $99 might sell tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies at $19.99 or $9.99. The first company to duplicate and distribute home video was Magnetic Video in 1977. Magnetic Video was established in 1968 as an audio and video duplication service for professional audio and television corporations in Farmington Hills, Michigan, United States, although Avco's 1972 Cartrivision system preceded Magnetic Vision's expansion into home video by a few years.[8]

Decline of videotape and rise of disks

By the 2000s decade, home video consumers moved away from videotapes, increasingly preferring DVDs. Pictured is a cart of used videotape movies on sale at a secondhand market.

In the early 2000s, VHS began to be displaced by DVD. The DVD format has several advantages over VHS. A DVD consists of a single disc, which is spun at high speed, while VHS videocassettes had several moving parts that were far more vulnerable to breaking down under heavy wear and tear. Each time a VHS cassette was played, the magnetic tape inside had to be yanked out and wrapped around the inclined drum head inside the player. While a VHS tape can be erased if it is exposed to a rapidly changing magnetic field of sufficient strength, DVDs and other optical discs are not affected by magnetic fields. The relative mechanical simplicity and durability of DVD compared to the fragility of VHS made DVDs a far better format from a rental store's perspective.

Though DVDs do not have the problems of videocassettes, such as breakage of the tape or the cassette mechanism, they can still be damaged by scratches. Another advantage from the perspective of video rental stores is that DVDs are physically much smaller, so they take less space to store. DVDs also offer a number of advantages for the viewer; DVDs can support both standard 4x3 and widescreen 16x9 screen-aspect ratios, and can provide twice the video resolution of VHS. Skipping ahead to the end is much easier and faster with a DVD than with a VHS tape (which has to be rewound). DVDs can have interactive menus, multiple language tracks, audio commentaries, closed captioning, and subtitling (with the option of turning the subtitles on or off, or selecting subtitles in several languages). Moreover, a DVD can be played on a computer.

Due to all these advantages, by the mid-2000s, DVDs had become the dominant form of prerecorded video movies in both the rental film and new movie markets. In the late 2000s, stores began selling Blu-ray discs, a format that supports high definition.

Early 4K Blu-ray release at Best Buy: A 4K Blu-ray disc player was also released.

Blu-ray is a digital optical disc data storage format, designed to supersede the DVD format, and is capable of storing several hours of video in high definition (HDTV 720p and 1080p). The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as feature films and for the physical distribution of video games. The plastic disc is the same size as DVDs and compact discs.[11]

Blu-ray was officially released on June 20, 2006, beginning the high-definition optical disc format war, in which Blu-ray Disc competed against the HD DVD format. Toshiba, the main company supporting HD DVD, conceded in February 2008.[12] Blu-ray faces competition from video on demand (VOD) and the continued sale of DVDs.[13] Notably, as of January 2016, 44% of U.S. broadband households had a Blu-ray player.[14]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, consumers continued to use VCRs to record over-the-air TV shows, because consumers could not make home recordings onto DVDs. This last barrier to DVD dominance was broken in the late 2000s, with the advent of inexpensive DVD recorders and other digital video recorders (DVRs). DVR devices, which record shows onto a hard disk or flash storage, can be purchased from electronics stores or rented from cable or satellite TV providers.

Despite the mainstream dominance of DVD, VHS continued to linger on into the 2000s and gradually faded into history during the 2010s. The switch to DVD initially led to the marketplace being flooded with used VHS videocassettes, which were available at pawnshops and second-hand stores, typically for a much lower price than the equivalent film on a used DVD. In July 2016, the last known manufacturer of VCRs, Funai, announced that it was ceasing VCR production.[15]

A time period is usually required to elapse between theatrical release and availability on home video to encourage movie theater patronage and discourage piracy. Home-video releases originally followed five to six months after theatrical release, but since the late 2000s, most films have arrived on video after three to four months. As of 2019, most major theater chains mandate an exclusivity window of 90 days before home-video release, and 74–76 days before digital sell-through.[20] Christmas and other holiday-related movies are sometimes not released on home video until the following year, when the holiday occurs again.[21] Major studios have made films available for rental during their theatrical window on high-end services that charge upwards of $500 per rental and use proprietary hardware.[22]

Exceptions to the rule include the Steven Soderbergh film Bubble, which was released in 2006 to theaters, cable television, and DVD only a few days apart.[23] Netflix has released some of its films, such as Roma and The Irishman, in limited theatrical release followed by streaming availability after less than 30 days.[20]

Many television programs are now also available in complete seasons on DVD. It has become popular practice for discontinued TV shows to be released to DVD one season at a time every few months and active shows to be released on DVD after the end of each season. Prior to the television DVDs, most television shows were only viewable in syndication, or on limited "best of" VHS releases of selected episodes. These copyrighted movies and programs generally have legal restrictions on them preventing them from, among other things, being shown in public venues, shown to other people for money, or copied for other than fair use purposes (although such ability is limited by some jurisdictions and media formats, see below).

After the passage of the Video Recordings (Labelling) Act of 1985 in the United Kingdom, videotapes and other video recordings without a certification symbol from the British Board of Film Classification on their covers - or on the tapes themselves - were no longer allowed to be sold or displayed by rental shops.[24] These tapes are called "Pre-Certs" (e.g., Pre-certification tapes). Recently these tapes have generated a cult following, due to their collectability.

Every year since 2004, the film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato holds the DVD Awards, where they award the highest quality DVDs (and later Blu-rays) released by home-media companies around the world.[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]

• Copyright
• Direct-to-video
• Film distribution
• Home cinema
• Laserdisc
• Videocassette recorder
• Capacitance Electronic Disc