VHS

A recorder built for a family room

The first VHS machine was the JVC HR-3300, announced in Japan on 9 September 1976 and on sale from 31 October that year in Akihabara, Tokyo. It weighed roughly 30 pounds (about 13.6 kg), lighter and smaller than any comparable recorder then available, and the format was designed to sit under a television a household already owned. Regional versions followed, the American HR-3300U and the British HR-3300EK reaching shops in 1978.

The project was older than the product. In 1971 JVC engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano drew up a "VHS Development Matrix", twelve objectives that read like a product brief: compatibility with any ordinary television, broadcast-quality pictures, at least two hours of recording, tapes interchangeable between machines, expandability to cameras and dubbing, low price, easy operation and servicing, and a design buildable in high volume from interchangeable parts. JVC cut its video budget in 1972 and shelved the programme, but the two carried on in secret and had a working prototype by 1973.

Three inventions that made it small

VHS earned its compact transport from three pieces of engineering. The first was the loading mechanism, sometimes called M-loading: U-matic and Beta drew tape out with one loading pole and wrapped it around the head drum in a U shape, while VHS used two poles to pull the tape into an M shape, a path that took less space.

The second was DL-FM, a circuit placing a high-pass filter, a low-pass filter and two limiters ahead of the FM demodulator, which made high-density recording practical. The third was the PS colour process, added because slanted azimuth recording could not eliminate colour crosstalk on its own; it suppressed that interference by exploiting the strong line-to-line correlation of colour signals.

What a VHS cassette actually is

The cassette is a plastic shell 187 mm wide, 103 mm deep and 25 mm thick, held together with five Phillips screws, with an anti-despooling mechanism between the spools. Inside sits 12.7 mm (half-inch) Mylar tape coated with metal oxide, wound on two spools; a T-120 cassette carries 247.5 metres of it, and clear leaders at each end give the transport an optical auto-stop.

The tape moves at 3.335 cm per second in NTSC standard play and 2.339 cm per second in PAL, while the head drum spins at 1,798.2 rpm in NTSC machines and 1,500 rpm in PAL. A maximum practical tape load of about 430 metres gives roughly four hours in a T-240 at standard play, or five hours in a PAL E-300. Long-play modes doubled and tripled running time by slowing the tape, at a cost in detail: standard play resolved the equivalent of about 250 vertical lines, long play about 230, the slowest speeds fewer.

The format war was decided early

Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry tried to settle the market on one standard in 1974, and Sony, whose Betamax prototype was nearly finished, came close to having it adopted. JVC argued for an open standard and won over Matsushita, its majority shareholder, by pointing at Beta's one-hour recording limit; Matsushita brought Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Sharp with it, and the ministry dropped the plan.

The numbers moved quickly once both were on sale. By 1980 VHS controlled 60 percent of the North American market, Beta's share of American VCR sales fell to 25 percent by 1981, and by 1987 VHS accounted for 90 percent of the United States VCR market. Sony built VHS recorders from 1988 while still making Betamax machines until 2002. RCA launched the format in the United States on 23 August 1977 with the VBT200, designed by Matsushita and the first VHS recorder made outside JVC, capable of four hours in long-play mode; by 1986 Korean manufacturers were selling VCRs for under $200.

The hardware that built the video shop

Home recording was the original pitch, but pre-recorded tape turned out to be the business, and rental shops stocked films because the players were already in living rooms. As the IEEE milestone record on VHS puts it, sales of video software to the home exceeded box-office revenues for the major American film studios.

The long decline

DVD reached American shops in March 1997 and set the format's ceiling; DVD rentals passed VHS rentals in the United States for the first time in June 2003. Even in 2005, 94.5 million Americans still owned a VHS recorder, and the installed base of tapes kept the format alive long after new releases stopped. A History of Violence, sold on VHS in 2006, is widely regarded as the last release of a major motion picture in the format.

The hardware lingered longer than the software. JVC made its last standalone VHS-only recorder on 28 October 2008, and Panasonic showed a dual-deck VHS and Blu-ray player in 2009. Funai, manufacturing under the Sanyo brand and the last known maker of VHS equipment, stopped production in July 2016, citing falling sales and a shortage of components.

Twenty years on a shelf

The tape collection outlasted the machines that played it. In 2015 Yale University Library gathered nearly 3,000 horror and exploitation films issued on VHS between 1978 and 1985, describing the collection as the cultural id of an era. A sealed copy of the 1987 film Nukie, graded and then deliberately made rare, sold on eBay in 2023 for $80,600, and the last Blockbuster store, in Bend, Oregon, still rents tapes out.