Rewind your bootlegged copy of Mrs Doubtfire and dry your eyes.
With the news in the past week that the remaining US Blockbuster stores are shutting up shop, Bottoms Up took a moment to reflect upon the close of a chapter of our lives. After a short time of mourning it was clear that respects had not been paid to an earlier victim of our modern times – the VCR.
The same size as a respectable book, the VCR sat proudly upon shelves in millions of homes. In various stages of play they were returned to video store employees who scorned you every time they had to articulate the policy about rewinding your tape before returning it to the store.
It’s old technology, but within it are aspects that render it an important part of our media heritage. Here are our top three:
1. The VCR had pre-roll before you could buy it by the thousand
You know that YouTube clip has pre-roll, but the VCR was the first in-home media that had it within an individual piece of content. Remember fast-forwarding through them? Well, we face the same challenges today, albeit with greater tools at our disposal to make the pre-roll compelling and track users’ engagement with our product.
2. Pirates first set sail aboard the VCR
Remember how pissed your family was when you taped over Forrest Gump with a re-run of Gladiators? Please forgive me, mum and dad. You can’t blame me, Vulcan was cool and you probably should have punched the write protection tab.
Piracy is not a new affair. We all taped over content that was expensive to create and bypassed commercial outlets in order to re-watch it. To add value to the proposition of buying content, DVD introduced all those wonderful ‘Extras’. Albums reward your decision to purchase by providing ‘Album-Only’ tracks. The piracy-reality that VCR created led to a wealth of innovation around bonus content to entice the consumer – we’re still grappling with this today.
3. VCR = UGC
Ah, home movies. Yes, there were projectors before the VCR but the videotape really allowed people to make content. Ordinary people could splice together segments from their video recorder and put it onto a VCR to send to family and friends. (Vloggers, you owe it to the VCR).
Life has to go on. Hey, at least we have Vine.
This is for you, VCR. This is your swan song.
Pay your respects below in the comments section and let the magic live on. What was your favourite thing to watch on VHS? Jurassic Park or Aladdin?
Follow us on the Twitter @BottomsUpTweets for more Vines (not videotapes).