VCR Day

What the day is

VCR Day is observed on June 7. It marks the videocassette recorder, the machine that moved television from something you caught to something you kept.

That shift is easy to underrate now that everything is on demand. Before the VCR, missing a broadcast meant missing it permanently, and the schedule dictated the household's evening.

Origin and background

Videotape recording existed in broadcast studios from the 1950s, in machines the size of furniture. The consumer versions arrived in the mid-1970s, when Sony launched Betamax and JVC followed with VHS, beginning the format war that is the standard example of the genre.

VHS won, and not on picture quality, which Betamax arguably had. It won on recording length, cheaper licensing to other manufacturers, and consequently wider availability of both machines and prerecorded tapes. The lesson that the better format does not necessarily win has been cited in every format dispute since.

The most consequential fight was legal. Film studios sued Sony on the grounds that home recording was copyright infringement, and the case reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1984 that recording a broadcast to watch later was fair use and that a device with substantial legitimate uses could not be banned because it might also be misused. That principle shaped decades of technology law afterward.

The irony followed quickly: home video rental became a larger revenue source for the studios than theatrical release, and the industry that had tried to kill the machine came to depend on it.

How to take part

• Digitize old family tapes. Magnetic tape degrades, and thirty-year-old home recordings are closer to unreadable than most people assume.
• Check the storage: tapes should be stored upright, away from heat, damp and anything magnetic.
• Rewind before storing long term, and never leave a tape parked mid-reel in a machine.
• Watch something on tape if you still have a working deck, tracking lines and all.
• Read about the 1984 ruling. It is the reason recording devices are legal at all.