History
Prior to the advent of home video as a popular medium in the late 1970s, most feature films were inaccessible after their theatrical runs for the general public. They were only viewable in theatrical re-releases, revival houses and television broadcasts. Super8 versions (often heavily edited) of some of the more popular theatrical features were sold at high prices since the late 1960s (see section Packaged movies at Super 8 mm film).
The first company to duplicate and distribute home video was Magnetic Video, established as an audio and video duplication service for professional audio and television corporations in Farmington Hills, Michigan, USA, in 1968. Although Avco's 1972 Cartrivision system preceded Magnetic Vision's expansion into home video by a few years, it took until the late 1970s that VHS and Betamax became widely available for home use. Major United States players in the video rental business today include Netflix.
Read more about this topic: Home Video
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)