Video and DVD Industries

Paul McDonald

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844571680
• eBook ISBN: 9781839021107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

When the videocassette recorder was launched on the consumer market in the mid-1970s, it transformed home entertainment. Bringing together complementary but also competing interests from the consumer electronics industry and the film, television and other copyright industries, video created a new sector of media business. Two decades later, DVD reinvented video media for the digital age. DVD provided consumers with an innovative form of entertainment technology and almost instantaneously became the catalyst for a huge boom in the video market. Although the VCR and DVD created major markets for video hardware and software, the video business has been continually shaped by industry conflicts and tensions. Repeatedly the video market has become divided when faced with the introduction of competing formats. Easy reproduction of films and other works on cassette or disc made video software a lucrative market for the copyright industries but also intensified struggles to combat the effects of commercial piracy. 'Video and DVD Industries' examines the business of video entertainment and provides the first study looking at DVD from an industrial perspective. Detailing divisions in the video business, the book outlines industry battles over incompatible formats, from the Betamax/VHS war, to competing laserdisc systems, alternatives such as video compact disc or Digital Video Express, and the introduction of HDDVD and Blu-ray high-definition systems. Chapters also look at the formation of international markets in the globalization of video media, the contradictory responses of the Hollywood studios to video and DVD, and the legal and technological measures taken to control industrialized video piracy.

1

Bringing Entertainment Home: The Consumer Electronics Industry and the VCR

The videocassette recorder or VCR was the product of two histories, one technological the other social. Technologically the VCR has a very specific history tied to the research and development programmes undertaken in Japan, the US and Europe from the early 1960s onwards aimed at creating a consumer-level video recorder. That history itself belongs to the broader history of video recording, which had commenced from the start of the 1950s with projects aimed at inventing a recording apparatus for use by the nascent television industry, resulting in the videotape recorder (VTR). Yet as the VCR and VTR both used magnetic tape, then video belongs to a longer history which stretches back to early attempts in the 1890s by the Danish electrician Valdemar Poulsen to use magnetic material for recording.

Before magnetic tape, from the late 1870s cylinders and then wax discs were used as recording media for sound. On 30 April 1877, the French poet and amateur scientist Charles Cros deposited with the Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Paris a paper titled Procédé d’enregistrement et de reproduction des phénomènes perçus par l’ouïe (Procedure for the Recording and Reproduction of Phenomena of Acoustic Perception), outlining a system for recording and reproducing sound using a disc and lamp-blackened glass (Gelatt, 1977: 23–4; Kittler, 1999: 21). Cros lacked the financial backing to create a working version of his process but later in 1877 the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison produced his ‘talking machine’, the phonograph. Cros had nevertheless clearly grasped the fundamental idea of recording. To introduce the first book of his collected poetry, Le Collier de griffes (The Neckless of Claws), Cros wrote the poem Inscription, the final line of which summarised his scientific endeavours in recorded sound: ‘Le temps veut fuir, je le soumets’ (‘Time would flee, I subdue it’) (translated by and cited in Kittler, 1999: 22). Cros identified the technological effect of recording: to capture the moment and thereby arrest or subdue the passage of time.

Nearly a century later, when the Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony launched its Betamax VCR onto the consumer market, the company’s co-founder, Akio Morita, took credit for neatly labelling the main benefit of the machine’s recording functionality as ‘time-shifting’. In speeches promoting Betamax, Morita eulogised the benefits of the VCR, claiming ‘Now you can grab a TV programme in your hand’ and ‘With the VCR, television is like a magazine – you can control your own schedule’ (Morita, Reingold and Shimomura, 1987: 208). Time-shifting was certainly innovative, because for the first time television viewers could record programming at one time for viewing at another. However, beyond the specific development of video recording for domestic viewing, the VCR was the product of the deeper modernist preoccupation – displayed by Cros, Edison and other media innovators of the nineteenth century – which was concerned with the wish to create technologies capable of subduing time.

As suggested in the Introduction, video has no essence. There is no essential purpose or use for which video can be employed and the VCR became a flexible medium with multiple uses. Yet despite its various possible applications, the VCR was always conceptualised by the developers who invented it, and the majority of consumers who bought it, as a domestic media technology. Once the VCR was integrated into the home, it joined a range of technologies already available for domestic media consumption, including the newspaper, magazine, book, record player, radio and television. VCRs joined what Hermann Bausinger has referred to as the domestic ‘media ensemble’ (1984: 349). Each of these media had the effect of creating a bridge between the private sanctuary of the home and the outside public world. As David Morley (2000: 87) notes, communication technologies have a disembedding effect in relation to the home, simultaneously

articulat[ing] together that which is separate (to bring the outside world into the home, via television, or to connect family members, via the phone, to friends or relatives elsewhere) but, by the same token, to transgress the . . . boundary which protects the privacy and solidarity of the home from the flux and threat of the outside world.

The VCR brought the outside world of cinema or television into the home but it further connected the home with forms of culture produced beyond its physical domain. As media technologies and forms traverse the boundary between the inside and the outside of the home, so that the outside is always present on the inside, then VCRs and other domestic media like recorded music, home cinema, radio and television contribute to the formation of what Morley terms ‘mediated domesticity’ (p. 86). The VCR is therefore not just the product of technological innovation but of a history of social change which has seen the home become the centre of media consumption while simultaneously linking the private domestic context into the wider currency of publicly circulated culture.

This chapter explores the historical emergence of the VCR, which it sees as the product of several factors. Initially, it considers how, from the late nineteenth century, a range of new media technologies were targeted at domestic use to make the home a key site of media consumption. The chapter then explores the development of magnetic recording and how this led to the introduction in the 1950s of the VTR as a video recording technology for the television broadcasting industries. As argued in the Introduction, video is not an industry but a collection of industries. One of these is the consumer electronics business, which is responsible for the manufacture and marketing of video hardware. The chapter traces the broad change which occurred during the twentieth century as Japan became the leading global force in consumer electronics. It also looks at pioneering attempts to launch video recording technology on the consumer market and how the Japanese companies Sony, JVC and Matsushita developed the first commercially successful VCRs, resulting in the format war between Betamax and VHS. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on how the VCR transformed the dynamics of television viewing.

EARLY HOME MEDIA AND THE BUSINESS OF ENTERTAINMENT

According to Witold Rybczynski (2001), it was not until the seventeenth century that Western European societies began to regard the home as a place of private refuge. Whereas previously the home accommodated work and living, the separation of these two spheres resulted in the ‘privatization of the home’, giving rise to ‘a growing sense of intimacy, of identifying the house exclusively with family life’ (p. 39). Home became not simply a physical place but a concept associated with ideas of privacy, domesticity and comfort. From the start of the nineteenth century, the introduction of gaslight and ventilation systems contributed to what Rybczynski describes as ‘the mechanization of the home’: ‘Domestic technology such as the gasolier and the ventilation duct represented an invasion of the home, not only by new devices, but by a different sensibility – that of the engineer and of the businessman’ (p. 145). As the electrification of the home commenced by the end of the century, then technologies designed and sold to assist the comfort of domestic living became a feature of bourgeois living in the Victorian household.

Separated from work, the home became a place of leisure. From the late nineteenth century, mechanisation and electrification extended to the creation of technologies intended to amuse and entertain. New technologies for home entertainment were invented targeting a market broadly conceptualised as the bourgeois family gathered together in the privacy of the home during their leisure time. The trend which Rybczynski describes as ‘the mechanization of the home’ therefore led to the creation of what Barbara Klinger (2006: 5) describes as ‘the technologized home’, and as various mechanical and electrical media technologies were assimilated into domestic living, so the mediatised home took shape.

Recorded Sound

In the second half of the nineteenth century a number of inventions were devised to record and replay sound. It would not be until the last two decades of that century, however, that sound recording technology became commercially available. This early market for recorded sound was divided between competing systems based either on cylinder or disc formats. Patented on 24 December 1877 by Edison, the phonograph employed a cylinder wrapped in tin foil for recording. Working in Washington DC, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter devised a similar system, the graphophone, patented in June 1885, using wax-coated cardboard cylinders to produce more durable recordings (Koenigsberg, 1990: xxiii). On 26 September 1887, Emile Berliner, a German émigré working in the US, patented the gramophone. Departing from the cylinder systems, Berliner’s gramophone recorded and replayed sound on photoengraved discs.

Initially, the competing formats divided the market, impeding growth. At the start of the twentieth century, Eldridge Johnson was manufacturing and selling gramophones in the US. Johnson introduced innovations by adding a motorised drive, improving the sound box and developing an efficient process for recording which used wax discs (Gelatt, 1977: 133). After Berliner and Johnson agreed to pool their patents, on 3 October 1901 the Victor Talking Machine Company was incorporated. Use of the generic term gramophone was dropped as the company marketed its branded machine simply as the Victor (p. 134). By controlling all the key patents relating to disc systems, Victor was able to beat off competition from the Columbia Phonograph Company, its nearest rival, and as disc-based systems emerged as the dominant format, the industry achieved the standardisation needed for market growth.

When recorded sound technology first appeared, questions surrounded its potential uses. Edison believed the phonograph would serve many purposes, including dictation, elocution, education, articulate clocks, the preservation of languages and as a ‘Family Record’ (p. 29). Of these possible applications, Edison preferred to see the phonograph as a ‘talking machine’ for use in offices to record business correspondence. Marketing the machine therefore concentrated on its use in commerce, and the phonograph was priced too high for a mass consumer market. In contrast, when Berliner first presented the gramophone on 16 May 1878 to members of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, he promoted the machine for its entertainment value. He envisaged the gramophone would see ‘prominent singers, speakers, or performers derive an income from royalties on the sale of their phonautograms’ (p. 63). In the copy for an advertisement from Christmas 1900, the gramophone was sold as a popular and accessible entertainment technology, welcome ‘everywhere and by everybody’.

No matter how remote your habitation, it brings within the family circle the actual voices of orators, singers, comedians, and story-tellers, who perhaps at that very moment are delighting Metropolitan audiences with the same eloquence, melody, humour, and dialect that is coming from the Gramophone in the quiet of a country home hundreds of miles away. (illustration in Moore, 1976: 40–1)

Technology was therefore only one factor distinguishing the gramophone from the phonograph. Berliner’s machine was conceived principally as a medium for commercial entertainment, to be used and consumed in the home, and supported by sales of recordings of popular performances.

By the end of the 1890s, the recording industry was well established in the US, and the domestic market was providing the foundation for US companies to expand into international territories. From 1888, the Edison-Bell company established a secure base in Europe, exporting phonograph and graphophone merchandise to the region through its London office (Gelatt, 1977: 100). France responded well to the new technology and in 1897 Columbia opened its first overseas office in Paris. It was Berliner, however, who most actively pursued the global extension of his business. William Barry Owen was entrusted with exclusive rights to sell gramophones and recordings in Europe from his London office, and in May 1898 he founded the Gramophone Company (p. 105). According to their trading agreement, Victor handled sales in East Asia together with North and South America, while Gramophone looked after Europe, Africa, Australia and the rest of Asia (Gronow and Saunio, 1998: 11).

Home Cinema

Before the arrival of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, shadowplays, magic lanterns, peepshows, panoramas and dioramas all entertained through displays of visual spectacle in public spaces, including theatres and fairgrounds. Optical toys, such as the Thaumatrope, Phenakisticope, Zoetrope, Viviscope and Praxinoscope, also provided visual entertainment in the home. Between 1894 and 1895, Edison’s Kinetoscope, along with the Bioscope of Max and Emil Skladanowsky, and the Cinématographe of Louis and Auguste Lumière, emerged as early examples of film technology. As Edison and the Lumières commercially exploited their technologies, the consumption of moving pictures was located outside the home in the public spaces of Kinetoscope parlours and theatre, vaudeville or fairground presentations. However, as Peter Krämer (1996: 15) has shown, Edison originally conceived of his motion picture apparatus as not only a technology for use in the home but also as a device which he hoped would receive audiovisual signals transmitted to the home by the telegraph and telephone. For Krämer therefore, this vision of ‘the “cinema” arose, then, out of what . . . could be called Edison’s “televisual imagination”’ (p. 16). As similar ideas were articulated by contemporaries of Edison,

the big screen literally putting the home in contact with the world outside, blurring and dissolving the boundaries between the most private spaces and the public sphere, was the perceived end point and centre piece of late nineteenth century developments in media technologies. (p. 17)

Some of these intentions were pursued when, between 1896 and 1912, a series of projectors aimed at the home market appeared in Europe and the US (Mebold and Tepperman, 2003; Singer, 1988). Possibly the first of these was W. Watson’s Motorgraph, which came onto the market in Britain at the end of 1896. Many other examples followed. In 1897, the American Parlor Kinetoscope Company released a domestic version of Ediso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Video Business
• 1. Bringing Entertainment Home: The Consumer Electronics Industry and the VCR
• 2. Disc to Digital: From Videodisc to DVD
• 3. Porous Media: Global Diffusion of Video and DVD
• 4. Hollywood Home Entertainment: Controlling and Profiting from Video Software
• 5. Videocopia: Shaping the US Market in the Digital Age
• 6. Illicit Business: The Global Economy of Industrialised Video Piracy
• Conclusion: Video Futures
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright