The Video Player Can Be Traced Back To 1968
[BBC Tomorrow's World clip, 1968]
"It's going to do for television what the record did for radio," said James Burke.
You can see the full video here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=331363491615829
Little did he know where this would all lead, and what incredible technologies lay in the future.
What Burke was showing
The machine on screen was EVR, short for Electronic Video Recording. Despite the name, it couldn't record anything. It was a play-only system that stored pictures on photographic film inside a cartridge, developed by the American broadcaster CBS in 1967. The cartridge slotted into a player connected to an ordinary television set.
Burke's comparison with the record was well chosen. EVR was developed by a team led by Dr Peter Goldmark, the man who had given the world the long-playing record twenty years earlier, and CBS promoted it as the sight-and-sound equivalent of the LP. The idea was simple: buy a film or programme on a cartridge, take it home and watch it whenever you liked.
In 1968, that was remarkable. Television was something you watched when the broadcaster decided to show it. If you missed it, it was gone.
Right idea, wrong technology
EVR never reached living rooms. The cartridges were expensive to produce, and CBS abandoned the project in 1971 when Sony launched a video cassette recorder with much cheaper tapes.
Burke was right about where television was heading. He just picked the wrong machine. The future belonged to magnetic tape.
Tape takes over
Video tape already existed in 1968, but only in television studios, on machines the size of a wardrobe. Over the next decade it shrank to fit under the TV.
Philips brought its first home video cassette recorder to Britain in the early 1970s. Then came the format war: Sony's Betamax in 1975 and JVC's VHS in 1976. VHS won, and by the end of the 1980s a video recorder was a fixture in British living rooms. Families recorded programmes off the television, set timers that never quite worked, and queued at the video shop on a Friday night.
The bigger change came with the camcorder. For the first time, ordinary families could film themselves. Birthdays, weddings, Christmas mornings and first steps were captured in moving pictures and sound, on VHS, VHS-C, Video8 and later MiniDV tapes.
From discs to the device in your pocket
Tape gave way to DVD in the late 1990s, then Blu-ray. Then the physical disc started to disappear altogether. YouTube arrived in 2005, BBC iPlayer in 2007, and streaming became the way most of us watch.
Today the phone in your pocket records better video than a studio camera of 1968 and can send it around the world in seconds. Burke's prediction came true many times over. Television became something you could own, keep and replay, just like a record. What nobody in 1968 could have pictured was carrying a lifetime of film in a jacket pocket.
The tapes left behind
One part of this story has not moved with the times: the tapes themselves. Millions of family videos from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are still sitting in lofts, cupboards and shoeboxes.
Those tapes are ageing. Magnetic tape degrades over time, and damp, heat and mould speed it up. The machines to play them are disappearing too. The last VHS recorders were made in 2016, and every year there are fewer working players left.
The technology Burke saw as the future in 1968 is now history. The memories recorded on it don't have to be.
Bring your videos forward
At Photo Revivals, we digitise VHS, VHS-C, Video8, Hi8 and MiniDV tapes, so your family films can be watched on a computer, TV, tablet or phone, shared with relatives and kept safe for the future. Get in touch to find out more.
