named Charles Ginsburg began leading a research
team at the Ampex Corporation. Two years before
his death, Ginsburg would be inducted into the Na-
tional Inventors Hall of Fame for “one of the most
significant technological advances to affect broad-
casting and program production since the begin-
ning of television itself.” The VCR became available
to the public in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Movie studios at first resisted the VCR, as they had
resisted television some three decades earlier. Con-
gress debated a number of bills attempting to regu-
late public use of VCRs, but it failed to pass any of
them. An appeals court initially ruled against Sony’s
use of VCRs to record movies, but in 1984 the U.S.
Supreme Court reversed that decision on the
grounds that home recording fell under “fair use”
copyright provisions.
Developing the Marketplace At first, two different
videocassette standards competed for consumers’
dollars, JVC’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax, or Beta, for-
mat. Betamax dominated the market at first, but
VHS eventually took over the market. In addition,
video discs sought a share of the prerecorded film
marketplace. Most of the early VCRs were manufac-
tured in Japan; the video disc was created in the
United States. Initially VCRs were expensive, costing
in the range of $1,000, and so were prerecorded
movies. They were seen in the early 1980’s as luxury
items. It was more economic for home viewers to
rent both the player and the videocassette from
small neighborhood stores that sprang up in com-
munities throughout the United States and Canada.
The rented devices usually only played prerecorded
tapes; they generally did not offer renters the option
of recording other programming from television.
Three years before the start of the 1980’s, a De-
troit, Michigan, businessman named Andre Blay
obtained permission from Twentieth Century-Fox
to sell on videocassette fifty films from the studio’s
library through the Video Club of America. Few
people owned VCRs at that time, but some nine
thousand consumers joined the club. The Video
Club of America may have constituted the initial
impetus for the development of the video rental
market. It was the first corporation to release mov-
ies on VHS, and it soon expanded and acquired imi-
tators. Seeing its success, Twentieth Century-Fox
bought Blay’s video company and, in 1982, reorga-
nized it as Twentieth Century-Fox Video. Later that
year, Fox merged its video operations with CBS
Video Enterprises.
It was possible to purchase prerecorded video-
cassettes rather than renting them, but they, too,
were prohibitively expensive—often costing one
hundred dollars or more. Given those costs, it made
more sense for most people to pay around five dol-
lars to rent a video and a player for a limited pe-
riod—ranging from overnight to a few days—than it
did for them to buy their own tapes and players.
Video rental stores would sell their renters a
membership, which had to be purchased before any
movies could be taken home. Some rental stores
were independently owned and operated; others,
like Video Stop and Adventureland Video, were
franchised. The stock of available movie titles often
varied from one store to another.
In the 1980’s, hardly any of the rental video play-
ers came with a remote control. A viewer had to
move to the VCR to turn the player on or off or to
stop or pause the tape. The earliest so-called remote
control was physically connected by a plug-in wire to
the front of the VCR. Even then, such devices were
generally available only to purchasers, rather than
renters, of VCRs. The movie and television indus-
tries encouraged consumers to rent rather than buy
videos during much of the 1980’s.
Another factor affecting the rise of video rentals
was that, by the mid-1980’s, television viewers paying
for cable or other viewing packages were becoming
dissatisfied with the viewing options provided by
commercial television. This dissatisfaction coincided
with a gradual decrease in the price of VCRs to
the point where many families could afford to buy
one. Just as gradually, the mom-and-pop video stores
found it less necessary to rent VCRs to their cus-
tomers and began simply to rent the videocassettes
themselves. By 1983, most of the movie studios had
dropped their attempts to license their movies on
video and began instead to sell videotapes to both
rental stores and home users with their own VCRs.
By the mid-1980’s, rental outlets had become so
widespread that increasing numbers of customers
felt the lower prices justified their own purchase of a
home VCR.
The first movie significantly to exploit the new de-
mand for videocassettes wasLady and the Tramp,a
popular 1955 Walt Disney animated film focusing on
the adventures of a pampered pooch (Lady) and a
roving mongrel (Tramp). Walt Disney ProductionsThe Eighties in America Home video rentals 477