Rant #2,140: Double Vision

Yesterday, I spoke briefly about a major anniversary in my life, the 48th anniversary of my bar mitzvah, a period in my life that I will never, ever forget.

But today, we are going to focus on an anniversary that really changed the lives of everybody, not just me.

Today. May 10, is the 43rd anniversary of modern home video as we know it, as in 1975, Sony Corp. introduced the Betamax machine in Japan.

It would be slightly after that the machine became available in this market, but once it did, the cat was out of the bag, and WE became the programmer of what we wanted to watch at any given time, not the networks and television stations.

If you remember, Betamax tapes were much different than VHS tapes, but Betamax was the real forerunner, allowing users who had spent more than $1,000 on the recorder to tape anything they wanted off the TV, and watch it when they wanted to, not when the TV stations wanted you to.

This was absolutely revolutionary, as it put this decision in the hands of the public for the very first time.

Through the coming of Betamax and the later debut of VHS, many of us learned to program things for the first time, to set the timers for what we wanted to watch when we wanted to watch them.

We also set the time--or at least some of us did. I remember that one of the big bugaboos about video recorders is that so many of us did not know how to set the time, so for those who didn't, the blinking 12:00 became a night light that we didn't want or need.

And eventually, even though the TV networks and movie studios fought it like heck, it became almost second nature to be able to record things off the TV, and later, pre-made tapes came out, with movies and shows that we supposedly wanted to watch.

And Stormy Daniels fans take note: the video revolution started with the adult film industry, which seized the moment and proved to mainstream studios that home video could work, and become a multi-billion-dollar industry unto itself.

Once VHS tapes came out, there was something of a short-lived "war" between Betamax and VHS. Betamax was clearly better; without going into the logistical details, the images on these tapes were clearer than on VHS, but there was the cost factor--for both the machines and tapes--that made VHS the clear-cut winner in this short competition.

After a few years, Betamax faded from view, and VHS was the way to go with home video, whether taping yourself or watching pre-made home video.

Yes, all these years later, videotaping seems like an antiquated way to watch the shows and movies that you wanted to watch when you wanted to--Netflix and streaming and YouTube have certainly taken care of that--but back in the 1970s and really, through the 1990s, when DVDs first came out, everybody seemingly recorded everything they could off the TV using video recorders.

It was revolutionary.

We had had personal audio recorders of every shape and size imaginable since the early 1950s, and they were fine for recordings whatever sounds we wanted to record. I remember actually recording some TV shows on audio cassettes in the mid-1970s, and that was fine for what I wanted to do with these tapes at the time.

But once video recorders came to the public--they had actually been around in industry since the early 1960s--and became affordable in the 1980s, everybody went video crazy, MTV became king of music videos, and those large tapes became part and parcel of being with it during that period.

Kids today would scoff at what we did back then, but we used the technology at hand, which set the groundwork for what we have today, where we can even use our phones to record video, and do it when it happens, all with a device that fits right in your pocket.

But it all started with Betamax, so today is a major anniversary for those who believe not necessarily that video killed the radio star, but that video helped us fulfill Andy Warhol's prophesy that one day, we would all be famous for 15 minutes.

Yes, that is paraphrasing what he said, but the advent of personal video has changed the world, has changed how we look at things, and has changed our perceptions of life in ways that people could not possibly foresee 43 years ago.

So although Betamax didn't last very long as a video format, it set the stage for modern personal video, so in honor of its anniversary, let's all go to the tape one more time!

As long as the tape does not get stuck in those old video recorders that we have stuffed somewhere in our homes.