Blog Post #4 - EOTO project

For my EOTO project, I studied the VCR, and how it came to be. Charles Ginsburg was the inventor of VCR, and this was the start to a very popular resource. VCR was the first technology that allowed you to watch and be able to record television. It was the most popular to people and very common between the 1990s to the 2000s. It was invented in the 1950s, but until the 1970s it was extremely expensive so not many people were able to afford them or even knew what they were until the price started going down. When it was very expensive so it was rare to have one, some people who did have one would record the television and sell their recordings out of the back of their cars. This became an issue but eventually was resolved and people started to be able to buy their own VCR and VHS devices.

The reason that people loved VCR so much, and was a big breakthrough in technology was because people finally were able to stream television and record what they watched. Before VCR was invented, people basically had no choice on what they could watch, there was not a wide range. Whatever was on the television was what you had to watch. VCR came along and gave more people a variety of what they were able to watch. It also allowed people to be able to buy movies at the store and record television so that they could go back later and re-watch what they watched earlier. The VCR is the machine which plays the tapes. There was a competition between Betamax by Sony and VHS tapes. These are what go inside of the VCR and are played. They were both very popular in the global market at the time. Betamax was very sharp and compact, but VHS was lower priced and you could use longer videos. Because of this VHS ended up winning, and robbing Sony of 40% of its business.

VHS changed how people watched movies and influenced what type of content was produced. This was the rise of direct to video films (movies that are released directly to home video formats, such as DVD or VHS without being released in theaters or on television first.) This led to the uprising in low budget and high creativity productions that had large amounts of people following.

This invention honestly changed our world. Without the discovery of VCR, we would not be where we are today. As of today, VCR is not popular anymore, but instead DVD. The downfall of VCR was in 2003, when DVD was invented. DVD was a better option because of its larger memory space and it was lighter and smaller in size. It was also multifunctional and more advanced. Without VCR we probably would not have led to the invention of the DVD. People were able to enjoy television more ever since the discovery of the VCR, because of its ability to record, and its way of allowing you to watch a greater variety of television and movies.

https://videoconvert.minitool.com/video-converter/vcr-vs-vhs.html#

https://everpresent.com/vcr-history/

https://foreverstudios.com/betamax-vs-vhs/

https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/glossary/vcr/?orgRef=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F&srsltid=AfmBOoqrzqJDbKqTikcatZTUVW0J0Rp7LyoW-DalMJV7vbguOcb-5qEy

https://www.onotone.com/blogs/modern-designs/the-rise-and-fall-of-vhs-a-journey-through-time?srsltid=AfmBOooGWyiB3JB-f3nWynvHPxd6DPvWECNAdSAnYTAjt5hXIOXVDSwY

https://digitalconverters.co.uk/blog/dvd-popular-vhs