VHS era is winding down - "The last big supplier of the tapes is ditching the format, ending the long fade-out of a product that ushered in the home theater.":
Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.
After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.
"It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away."....
Read the rest, for some amusing examples of what sells and what doesn't....
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Am I the only one who even remembers Betamax? Or record players? I even remember that there was a way to turn on TVs before remote controls were invented but I can't remember what it was.
Record Players are having a recovery. Look at very many indie groups - they are selling vinyl records at their concerts. Even EP's are on vinyl for some groups. Its a culty thing that they sound better. Technically they aren't as good as digital can be but they often have better production and less loudness compression.
Oh really?
http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/index.php?tle_id=82art_id=6&
and a cursory google search found a fair few suppliers of prerecorded VHS in India, China and various other major centres around the world - and there's probably far more than I found out in the sticks. Be careful - I suspect that this news item is the product of one person's skill with PR, knowing that news editors simply lap it up as they have done for generations.
Oh, I still use that method. It's big and right on the TV, while the remote is often AWOL (couch ate it, one of my daughters moved it, cat attacked it...)
Now, the channel-changing mechanism from way back when -- that's another story. I used to have a very old TV with actual knobs. I saved one of the knobs when the TV died and ever since then, I've challenged people to guess what it was, out of its former context. Very few (even fellow Gen-Xers) have succeeded...
Romeo and ColoRambler - yes, I remember fine-tuning the knob on our old black-and-white TV! And I remember Betamax (though I never had one).
Markk: As the article says, vinyl records have their fans and collectors, but VHS does not - it will just die into oblivion.
Ian Tindale: the article focuses on the USA. As in all cases of technology changes, it tends to remain viable much longer in the developing world.
Tell me about it! I went to Circuit City recently to buy a few VHS tapes. I couldn't find any. I asked an employee, who had to ask a second employee, who furrowed his brow and finally located a few on a bottom shelf, in a dark corner, pushed all the way to the back.