Earlier VCRs?

What if the VCR was invented earlier? How Early was the Earliest possible? How would this change history?
 
IIRC magnetic tape was market-ready in the late 30s, so without any distractions you could have magnetic image storage by the 1940s (I think that's about when it happened). Our big obstacle is TV technolofgy. It needs to get good enough fast enough that it's worth it for wealthy individuals to buy magnetic image tapes rather than projector film.

Maybe this could develop through the military? The US forces offer 'local flavour' TV to the troops in the early 60s by shipping magnetic tapes of major news and sporting events to overseas bases. Wealthy expatriates cotton on to the idea and a retired sergeant turns shipping copies of magnetic tapes from various US TV-stations overseas into a multimillion dollar business. These people are rich enough, and desperate enough, to shell out thousands of dollars for the equipment to watch the Superbowl 'like they do at home', and soon the idea spreads beyond US expats as other TV stations get in on the deal and upscale expat bars the world over offer 'home TV'.

Satellite television kills this particular market by the 70s, but the machines are by now so widespread that the business keeps itself alive through selling tapes of popular TV series and, beginning with some small rogue studios, movies. The magtape format is still a fairly clunky spool, but the new types are about the size of a 33rpm LP and come in plastic cassettes to protect the sensitive material. You just click them into the player and off you go.
 
Ok, I think it´s my job to state the obvious: Earlier VCRs, earlier porn industry!:p

The porn industry existed before video. Its great bopom owed much to the little VHS format, but at least as much to the change in obscenity laws and general acceptance of sexually explicit material.

Its structure could be very different, though. At the time video shook up the distribution formats and expanded the end-user market, porn producers had a self-image as maverick businessmen and social revolutionaries. If this happens earlier, the porn business might well end up much more closely tied to prostitution and organised crime and model itself less on Hollywood and more on Pattaya.
 

Markus

Banned
Hmm, depends on how much earlier VCRs are around. VHS VCRs were first sold in the late 70´s. If that happenes 10 to 15 years sooner we are in the flower-power/hippy-age. Somehow I doubt acceptance of sexually explicit material was lower at that time. *grin*
Getting VCRs started in the 50´s depends on the market penetr... err on how common TVs are, because you have to have TVs in almost all of the households first.
 
if vcr came out when the major studios own most theaters, id say we ll have the same problem now as with game consoles: each movie studio would have its own brand of vcrs that played only their movies.
 
Something to consider is that with VCRs and DVDs, pornography became more mainstream, with people like Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson, Asia Argento, et al. becoming minor celebrities. This also helped to serve as a major rallying point for the religious right...

In terms of world politics, Ayatollah Khomeini was able to recruit followers to his cause of overthrowing the Shah of Iran, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through messages via video-casettes to followers in Iran, while in exile in France. This could spell an earlier radicalization of Islam in the Middle East....
 
Maybe if TV became popular earlier....(they had television in the 1920s BTW)
That's less trivial than it sounds, actually.

There was very early television from the late 1920s, yeah: W2XB in the Albany, NY area was licensed in 1928, and may be the first ever television station (the station, under its current call sign WRGB, claims this is the case). Regardless, it's hard to imagine this sort of television really taking flight, as it was about as primitive as you could get. Originally, it broadcast at 21 lines of resolution, later getting an upgrade to double that. That's less than 1/10th of a standard definition NTSC signal from today.

I know that the Washington, DC experimental station W3XK operated under similar limitations, and got around it (to some extent) by broadcasting only silhouettes. Add the expense and unreliability of early mechanical sets to the mix, and I can't see this kind of early television taking off so close to the Depression. At least, not in the USA.

If not for World War II, though, you might get television to launch a few years earlier (early 1940s instead of the late 1940s/early 1950s), since most of the required technology for what we'd recognize as modern television was in place by the late 1930s (and was on public display at the 1939 World's Fair, no less).

That said, I don't think you strictly need earlier television to push back the introduction of VCRs a bit. As it is, video tape was introduced in the early 1950s. The first enclosed cassette didn't show up until the old U-matic things twenty some odd years later, but that seems like a relatively minor evolution once the initial work had been put into place.

The question, I guess, is how much earlier? U-matic based VCRs were introduced to the consumer market in 1971. It's possible they could catch on in advance of the coming of VHS and Betamax in the latter half of the decade. Alternatively, I kind of like carlton_bach's suggestion of using early video tape as a kind of transport medium for television programming.

Also, how much should it resemble OTL VCRs? It's easier to imagine a Quadruplex-based videotape-recording system in the early-to-mid-1960s than a earlier form of VHS. There are a few technical limitations of the format that prevented it from entering the consumer market, but my gut feeling is that all it really needs is some visionary to think of the consumer potential of the technology to speed things along considerably.
 
It's alive!!!:eek::eek::eek::rolleyes:

Actually, you don't need wealthy individuals or military support, you need better portable cameras. Don't forget, radio & TV networks needed news! If they could get tape from the field, they'd need players...& that could spark "civilian" use.... (I do like the idea of a "tapedisk". Reel to reel VCR?)
 
Earlier VCR's

I was thinking about this. If VCR's would have become more mainstream in 1967 instead of the mid-70's, there would be so many more older sporting events saved, like old AFL and NFL games from the 60's and early 70's, so much more NBC Baseball games of the week saved, and also more games out there of other sports, like the NHL and NBA.

Also, there would be more TV programs. It would be cool to see a recording of Sanford and Son live the night it was first aired in early 1972. Same thing with All in the Family and other shows.
 
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