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:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)