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Sony's SL-6300 VCR, the first Betamax machine, retailed for $1,300 in 1975. The ability to record a TV show when it is broadcast and watch it whenever you desire, often called time-shifting, is now among the most mundane of tasks. Ditto buying or renting a copy of a new hit movie to view at home. In the modern lexicon, "TiVo" is a verb, coined by fans of the DVR (digital video recorder), which was pioneered in part by the company of the same name. Similarly, the phrase "Blockbuster night," coined by the video software retailer, is widely understood to mean staying home to watch a movie picked up at the store. But time-shifting would not be possible, and neither TiVo nor Blockbuster would exist, if it were not for technological and legal precedents set by a much earlier product: the videocassette recorder, or VCR. Not long after Sony introduced one of the earliest VCRs, in 1976, two Hollywood studios filed a lawsuit against the company, contending that the device was illegal because its ability to record TV programs enabled consumers to illegally copy the studios' copyrighted property. After wending its way through a variety of lower courts, the lawsuit reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983. The following year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the VCR, declaring it legal and ruling that home video recording of broadcasts did not infringe upon the studios' copyrights; such recording fell under the "fair use" exception in copyright law, the Supreme Court decided. A steep rise in sales of VCRs, which has only recently abated, followed the decision. Yet it was a rise that was a long time coming. The earliest work on technologies leading to the VCR began in the early 1950s, when engineers at three laboratories (RCA, Ampex, and Bing Crosby's Labs) were simultaneously developing the ability to record video to magnetic tape. According to a history of the VCR produced by the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association), "In April 1956, a six-man development team at Ampex, headed by Charles Ginsburg and including a young college student named Ray Dolby, shocked the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Chicago with the first black-and-white videotape recording." Ampex introduced the model VR-1000 VTR (videotape recorder), priced at $50,000, for use by black-and-white-TV broadcasters. It used 2-inch-wide videotape. KING-TV in Seattle was the first customer for the VR-1000, which received a unit with serial number 1, the CEA says. Next, the CEA says, "RCA traded its color technology for Ampex's recording technology to produce the first color videotape recorder a few years later." RCA and Sony introduced more VTRs in the early 1960s. Among those were the RCA model TR-22, which was the world's first all-transistor VTR when it was introduced in 1962, and the Sony model PV-100, which was the world's first compact transistor VTR when it was introduced in 1963, according to the CEA and Sony. It was not long before the VTR migrated to the home. In 1965, Sony introduced the model CV-2000, which used open-reel and 0.5-inch-wide videotape and had a maximum recording time of one hour. The device was very large, measuring 10.75 inches high x 17 inches wide x 15.5 inches deep, and only a few hundred were sold, according to the CEA. "The idea of a videocassette first was proposed by Koichi Tsunoda, a Sony engineer, in 1964, after seeing Philips' audio cassette," the CEA recounts. "But the question was whether consumers were interested in recording TV programs." Despite the uncertainty, development work toward a consumer-oriented VCR continued, and in 1972 Philips was the first to introduce such a device. The Philips model 1500, introduced in England, was the first VCR for home use, the CEA says. It measured 6.5 x 22 x 15 inches. Three years later, Sony introduced the first Betamax VCR, which is widely regarded as the first commercially successful VCR. The model SL-6300 used 1/2-inch-wide videotape, could record one hour per tape, and cost $1,300. (The SL-6300 was the first standalone Betamax VCR from Sony. Some months earlier, the company had introduced a unit built into a color-TV console that cost more than $2,000, which was commercially unsuccessful.) Concerned that the VCR was a tool for copyright violation, MCA/Universal and Disney sued Sony in 1976, in the U.S. Federal District Court in Los Angeles. Sony won the case in 1979, but the studios appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit), which in 1981 reversed the lower court's decision, recalls Gary Shapiro, the president and CEO of the CEA. (At the time, Shapiro was an attorney with the law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, working on behalf of the consumer electronics industry.) The case then went to the Supreme Court, which put its stamp of approval on the VCR. "If that decision had gone the other way," Shapiro asserts, "the whole course of consumer technology would have been thwarted." Meanwhile, also in 1976, JVC (Victor Company of Japan) launched a competing VCR that used a 1/2-inch videotape, housed in a larger cassette than the Betamax tape, and based on a fundamentally different recording process. The VHS (Video Home System) was introduced in Japan with the model HR-3300, which could record two hours per tape. Starting in 1977, JVC, RCA, and a large number of other brands marketed the VHS technology in the United States. RCA developed a VHS tape with a four-hour capacity and launched a VCR model named SelectaVision that was priced below $1,000. Sales of VCRs skyrocketed. According to the CEA, which began tracking VCR sales in 1974, there were 250,000 VCRs sold in the United States in 1977, up from only 70,000 in 1976. By 1979, annual VCR sales nearly doubled to 475,000 units. The million-unit mark was broken in 1981, when nearly 1.4 million VCRs were sold. In 1984, 7.6 million VCRs were sold and the devices were in 10% of U.S. households. After the Supreme Court decision, in 1985, annual sales of VCRs jumped to 11.3 million units, and household penetration jumped to 18%. One year later, in 1986, nearly one third of U.S. homes had a VCR. More than half of households had a VCR by 1988, and by 2000 VCRs were in 95% of homes nationwide, and more than 23 million units were sold. "In six months, the VCR format war was practically over," the CEA says. "Sales of VHS machines caught and passed Beta as the video-recording format of choice. By the summer of 1979, VHS was outselling Beta by a margin of two to one." There were two reasons, Shapiro says: the larger capacity of VHS tapes, and widespread licensing of the VHS technology by JVC to other manufacturers. Sony did not widely license the Beta technology. Ultimately, Sony stopped selling Beta VCRs and started selling VHS units, which it continues to sell today. Nevertheless, the format wars continued for a while. In 1985, Sony unveiled Super Beta, and in 1987 S-VHS (Super-VHS) was introduced by JVC. In 1997, JVC launched D-VHS (Digital-VHS), a version of the format that let satellite-TV users record shows to videotape digitally, rather than in an analog form like other VCRs. (Satellite-TV broadcasts programs in a digital format, using MPEG-2 encoding and decoding.) The first D-VHS VCR from JVC, the HM-DSR100, was introduced in two forms: a standalone model and a combination VCR/satellite/TV receiver marketed in conjunction with the satellite-TV provider DISH Network. In 1999, JVC improved on D-VHS, when it introduced the model HM-DR10000, which was the world's first D-VHS VCR capable of recording 24 hours per videocassette, according to JVC. JVC combined the digital-video recorder and the S-VHS VCR in 2000, in the model HM-HDS1. In 2001, JVC introduced the HM-DH30000U, which recorded HDTV broadcasts. Since 2000, VCR sales have steadily declined each year, to 6.2 million units last year, and household penetration has fallen, too. By the end of 2002, the share of homes with VCRs fell to 92%, says the CEA. By 2007, the CEA expects annual sales of VCRs to fall to only 2.1 million units—a figure not seen since 1982. However, the figures don't include VCRs built in to DVD-VCR or TV-VCR combination devices, which today are sold by myriad manufacturers at prices well below $200. "The VCR has not been abandoned," declares Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis at the CEA. "While there are signs that VHS is fading away, it's still being used, still being purchased." by Robert E. Calem

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