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Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes?
- spijdar 6y ago> If $190 feels outrageous for a film about a kangaroo accidentally coming into money, consider the price of a limited-edition copy of the 1989 Disney film “The Little Mermaid,” which is listed on Etsy for $45,000. The cover art for this hard-to-find copy is said to contain a male anatomical part drawn into a sea castle. Not really a direct response to the article, but just because someone threw it up with a 45k price tag on Etsy isn't really a good sign these are actually "worth" that much. Anyone can set an arbitrary value for these, and jumping from $200 (which is pretty "absurd", but well within reason for collectors) to almost $50k without any other stepping stones seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
- dawnerd 6y agoAh, the good old Disney "Black Diamond" nonsense again. It's a new reseller trap. (I know this particular case is more about the cover art but it's the same thing). I really wish people would learn to look at sold comps instead of what the listing prices are.
- chaostheory 6y agoTo me this might be money laundering if it’s not really collectible or in demand. I’m not sure I understand the demand for VHS when both DVD and Blu-ray are superior media formats that are more user friendly than VHS
- spijdar 6y agoI think there's some demand for this sort of thing. People definitely collect way weirder. I've dabbled in retrocomputing, and spend e.g. a couple hundred bucks on rare but totally useless hardware because I enjoy it. But there's wasting money on a hobby and, well, spending tens of thousands of dollars. The union on a Venn diagram of people with tens of thousands of dollars of disposable income who are fanatical collectors of obscure Disney VHS tapes and shop on Etsy has to be vanishingly small. :)
- herbst 6y agoDvd and blue ray are both fragile and highly temporary. VHS is too, but if it starts breaking you still get a grainy film instead of nothing. I own neither but i get the appeal
- lotsofpulp 6y agoSurely the author of the article knows that too. But they need to sell an emotion evoking clickbait article, and quoting a few big irrelevant numbers helps with that.
- echelon 6y agoNice shoutout to Videodrome in Atlanta > “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,” said Matthew Booth, 47, the owner of Videodrome in Atlanta, which sells VHS tapes in addition to its Blu-ray and DVD rental business. If you're in the area, you owe it to yourself to check out. Some of the local filmmakers will stock their own films on VHS and only have them available for a short time. It's super indie and incredibly cool. [1] [1] https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/viva-videodrome-atlanta-video-rental-store-refuses-die/ https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/viva-v...
- rzz3 6y agoDoes the average person here actually have a NYT subscription? Their paywalls are awful and I’m not sure why they end up here.
- ratsmack 6y agoIt seems that a large number of posts here are from the NYT. This always makes me wonder if they, and others, post on sites like this to drive up their page views.
- podiki 6y agoWhile I'm sure plenty of sites do, a huge venue like NYT has so many readers there is bound to be HN users among them that will post anything remotely relevant. Most times I see something on a major site that I think would be worthwhile for HN, it has been posted long before I saw it.
- ratsmack 6y agoI know there are "services" that can post your site on various social media, but I don't know how prevalent they are or if it can be easily detected.
- pottertheotter 6y agoIt's never stuck out to me as being overrepresented in posts here, but I've never thought about it either. Full disclosure: it's one of the main news sources I follow.
- VideoHomeSystem 6y ago(Opinions are my own) They don't. A site like HN isn't in the top 10,000 referrers and no one has ever heard of it; traffic from this exact post is barely a blip. There's no business value. Teams responsible for backlinks would post on established social media in a very transparent way (from official accounts, etc.) Besides everyone here has JS disabled, four ad blockers installed and uses a text-based browser. If I personally made the call they would never have employees (or paid contractors) post here of all places.
- rektide 6y agowhat i want to know is who is still buying tape backups? lto-8 tapes are $85 for 12TB. that's not actually that stellar- you might not believe what good enterprise hard drives sell for!- but it's still 2 log2 orders of magnitude cheaper. it's throughput is faster than hard drives too! latency, alas, well, yeah, not so good. ;) alas tape is just so niche. sadly. because it's so economically awesome & sensible. there's something so excellent about offline media, not-so-near-line media, endless reams of tape, bought cheap. endless storage, deep backups. and durable, easy to ship off. vhs? meh. i see no reason to have any interest in vhs. tape drives though: i still just imagine a hard drive platter, endlessly unwinding. magnetic storage space, endlessly unfurling.
- m463 6y agoMaybe it is tape libraries where they are physically offline. I don't know, maybe there are hard disk changers too, that electrically and physically remove hard disks from the system?
- imagine99 6y agoTo my knowledge, there is still no alternative to tape backups that comes close in terms of price per TB, size/capacity, resilience and safety/security. Even for a smaller or mid-sized business, if you want to make sure you have a copy of your files that you can keep 100% safe in a ransomware attack, or that you can get out in a jiff during or before a disaster, a small tape loader for 3-5k that can keep up to 8 tapes in automatic rotation will get you there and is money well spent. End of each day (or work week) you let the little robot inside the loader drop one tape drop into the "mail slot" and remove it, quick and easy. You now have a full offline backup that won't even be destroyed if you drop it (usually). I think, if every company did that, we'd see a lot less impact from ransomware attacks. (There are also WORM tapes for archival purposes that can't be overwritten, so if you don't want to remove tapes every so often, you can just use these.) The only thing that bugs me is that there is very little innovation in that field, it's basically one or two companies that manufacture tapes, drives and loaders and they have some clever practices that force you to upgrade every 5 years or so (new drives are only backward-compatible for one generation usually). The market is really geared extremely towards large enterprise only. The loaders have ancient web UIs from the 90s, the connection ports are also legacy or datacenter-only (SCSI usually), unfortunately you won't find a tape drive with USB3/Thunderbolt (I'd probably buy one for my home if they existed, I'm imagining them in a nice form factor similar to the old Zip Drives). I've never understood why tapes as storage and backup media aren't more popular. In practice, they really don't have many downsides that I have noticed. That whole technology is incredibly mature and therefore very reliable.
- chovybizzass 6y agoMy mom gave me a VHS for my birthday. Wall-E 2. lol. the sequel....on VHS.
- schlipity 6y agoWas there a sequel to Wall-E? I'm showing Wall-E 2 is coming out in 2022.
- echelon 6y agoThis is what is wrong with Disney and why they'll struggle with the upcoming creator economy. They double down on their IP, and never stray too far from the familiar. Yes, it's a successful equation when single films are expensive to make. Increasingly, you can satisfy audiences with less expenditure and a more tailored experience. One thing going for big franchises is merchandising, but I'm not so sure micro merchandise won't find just as large a market. YouTooz, etc.
- NateEag 6y agoUhhhh... Disney owns some of the most successful producers of new content and franchises in recent years - Pixar and Marvel Studios. And, say what you will about the terrible Star Wars sequels they just cranked out, I've heard rave reviews of The Mandalorian from everyone I know who's watched it. Also Rogue One, which actually did feel like a tragedy set in the classic Star Wars universe. Suffice to say I think you're wrong here.
- echelon 6y agoIn ten years more content will be produced per year than in the past 50 years combined. New methods will make this dead simple for people to create at home. It will achieve the same photo realism that today's high budgeted, high production value projects have. Clutching onto franchises doesn't work in this new paradigm when kids can make their own Star Wars movies in their basement.
- ddingus 6y agoI just did this summer. I am raising my granddaughter right now. (Son got sucked into meth, and yeah. Nuff said.) I am having fun showing her tech. She is 5 and uses touch and buttons well. A family down the road had basically a full kids movie and Disney collection for $20. 50 some odd tapes in respectable condition. Total steal, and modern sets display the VHS surprisingly well. Seems at least some of the processing helps. Kind of unexpected, but welcome. Totally watchable. I remember it being worse not too long ago. She loves the VCR. The media is big. She can handle it. Hearing all the little noises and watching it take the tape, or give it back seems interesting to her, and the first time was hilarious! "Papa, papa, it gave the movie back to me! Do I say thank you? Is it all done now?" "Yeah baby, put it in the box and you can start another one." "I don't like rewind" (lol, who does kiddo?) Another family member has a couple real little ones. When mine moves past this experience, I will take it to them to enjoy. Overall, a nice 4 head player delivers. (Got that for a song at a yard sale same weekend) We have some nostalgia associated with many movies first seen on VHS. In my view, VHS looks best on a great analog CRT, but does not look bad on our rando Roku, kid room TV. I can certainly understand people seeking out titles they can't get otherwise. The whole thing remains enjoyable enough.
- bombcar 6y agoExactly - we’re going to setup a VCR for the kids - tapes are plentiful, cheap, and if they get destroyed there’s no big loss.
- ddingus 6y agoYeah. Should work out. Has for us. Optical was not forgiving enough. I setup to rip and burn kid editions. They damaged them frequently.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoDo the tapes still look okay? I remember when I was a child near the end of the VHS era, my parents tried to show us a copy of Back to the Future they'd bought when that movie had come out. The color had noticeably faded, to the point where I remember it almost looked black-and-white at first.
- roguesupport 6y agoIt's a soft-paywall, so I'll just assume the article somehow attributes it to "white supremacy" and "racism".
- tommica 6y agoAssumptions are the mother of all screw ups - I'd recommend changing your attitude, as that path of assuming negatives will not lead you to anything positive
- pacomerh 6y agoMusician VHS Head is probably still getting them. He grabs samples from movies and makes music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KyKxu27OHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KyKxu27OHU
- abhiminator 6y ago>Who is still buying VHS tapes? Patrick Bateman probably. Jokes aside that was a really good read. This article raises an important point about the fragmentation of content across different services (with many movie production houses starting their own streaming platforms, like Lionsgate for example). This fragmented streaming landscape really is a far cry from the idealistic "all content under one roof" posturing that steaming services generally took when launching their platforms. Another victim of the 'walled garden' problem plaguing the tech world.
- melomal 6y agoThe worst thing is, the more streaming services you buy the more scrolling you do. The less watching is done. Recently my TV melted and it took 2 months to get a new one. I had no choice but to watch what was on cable (in Poland) with only a select few channels showing movies in EN. The lack of choice actually made me enjoy what was given to me and aside from the ads, I didn't get FOMO thinking this was the wrong movie. So essentially, tech has broken up cable companies dominance by fragmenting the industry. I'm going to call it here first - there's a startup coming that will combine all streaming services into one package for a low-low cost of $30/month.
- ddingus 6y agoYup. And then the individual services will offer endless exclusives of some kind, churning accounts on a smallish time window. Honestly, I find it all super noisy and more or less abandoned TV. I am happy to watch a movie, or binge something good. But I am not gonna chase it all. My family is happy to, so it is their department now. And I get a nice benefit: When I do want something, I need only ask. They will set it right up and I am good to go. Perfect.
- melomal 6y agoI never thought it but to be fair some of the documentary content is pretty solid on Youtube. A silent video of a street food vendor preparing a meal is more than enough to keep me occupied for hours on end. I unfortunately fell for one of those 'exclusive' docu streaming services and within minutes wanted to get a refund.
- broabprobe 6y agoThe article fails to mention the reasons I love VHS: it’s so resilient: the gentle degradation (instead of brittle digital media), doesn't require the internet, doesn’t have distracting notifications/social integrations built in. It’s easier to pick what to watch. It feels nice to physically hold an object.
- ddingus 6y agoAll solid analog observations. People will express similar sentiments for cassette, vinyl, books.
- eru 6y agoWe could totally make digital codes that degrade gently. It's just usually not worth it for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that the code would probably need to be domain specific.
- foobar33333 6y agoIts not worth it because backups make infinitely more sense.
- eru 6y agoOh, coding isn't just for data at rest. It's also for transmission.
- artificial 6y agoJust keep re-encoding, like JPEGs that get passed around on social media.
- eru 6y agoThat's a different issue mathematically, even though it looks somewhat similar visually.
- m463 6y agoI was about to say, what about dvd and blu-ray? I don't plug in to the network... But then I remembered pausing a blu-ray the other day, and it had this popup showing a thumbnail and the chapter name, something like "Point of No Return". Gah. It pulled me out of the movie.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/OCQCP https://archive.is/OCQCP
- jedberg 6y agoBack in the day, if you bought a commercial film on VHS, in most cases it was recorded at SLP (super long play, 6 hours to a standard tape) and then they would just put 1/3 of the normal amount of tape inside, to save money. If you wanted to same movie recorded at SP (Standard play, 2 hours per tape) you usually had to pay extra, often double, and you couldn't find them in stores, you had to order them. My dad was a bit of an audiophile, so for movies where quality mattered, he'd special order the SP versions. One that I remember was UHF (the Weird Al vehicle) and another was Indiana Jones. Which we ordered again on SP SVHS once we got an SVHS player. So of you're planning to collect VHS, make sure you look at the recording speed. You might find a great deal if you find an SP tape.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 6y agoMy dad had Beta.
- specialist 6y agoYa. Adjacently: pre-DAT, my musician, audiophile, hacker friend would use higher end VCR gear and tapes for audio production. Some kind of DIY homemade multitrack (8?) setup. Back when professional recording studios had 16+ track gear and very expensive tapes.
- LocalH 6y agoComing from the USA, I don't remember seeing anything outside of the budget video range that used LP or SLP. Most of the prerecorded tapes I ever saw were always SP. Your different experience interests me. VHS SP mode video can actually be quite decent quality. In the early days of digital cable, I used to record things to VHS using an SVHS deck connected via S-Video. Those recordings, while not quite broadcast quality obviously, were some of the highest quality VHS recordings I ever saw, with a quite similar "feel" to the look of U-Matic.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoBelieve it or not, there are even VHS and DVD rental places still out there, yes the kind with a wall lined with shelves of VHS cassettes and another with DVD cases. The margins may be slim, but there are still takers. Just because a technology is a generation or two behind doesn't mean it's not in use.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoOur otherwise very digital library has a full room of these to borrow (France). Movies and music.
- foobar33333 6y agoI have not seen a single one in many years. My dad used to go to them regularly and every single one around us has closed.
- adventured 6y agoThere used to be one near me that managed to survive - until a few years ago - several decades through a lot of changes in the industry. What finally killed it off were four or five Redbox kiosks being placed within a 10-15 minute drive, at various foot traffic commercial locations. That wiped out a lot of the new releases disc rental business for the store and that was enough to tip them over (certainly the huge gains by Netflix, Prime, Apple, Roku in streaming since then might have done it just the same regardless).
- walrus01 6y agohttps://www.filmistruth.com/ https://www.filmistruth.com/ in Bellingham, WA
- underseacables 6y agoI record bicycles races off European television via satellite. The 8 hour VHS tapes are GOLD.
- happyjack 6y agoTell me more! I've been tempted to get into the satellite game. I love the one-day cycling races (Paris-Ruoubaix, etc.)
- InvisibleUp 6y agoSomething I'm surprised wasn't brought up is the demand for recordable tapes. There's quite an active collector's scene for tapes that might contain old TV airings, commercials, bumpers, etc. Often these end up archived online, as a sort of civic duty of preservation. In addition, blank tapes are useful for creating a specific lo-fi visual style for videos and images.
- t_akosuke 6y agoI have tons of these that i keep picking up from free boxes in the street, i rarely have the time to digitize them but they really are some beautiful time capsules and i should...
- t_akosuke 6y agoI have like 3 vcrs, a capture device and a pretty big collection for my tiny apartment. In my city (Berlin) putting free boxes in the street is common practice and between that and the abundant junk stores I can always find new material. Sometimes i find a full collection that feels like getting the login details to someone's pre-internet "accounts" - i recently found a box obviously belonging to a GI stationed in Germany, it had a good cross section of American pop culture, military aviation stunt videos, family home videos and the crown jewel, a tape called "Thank you america!" made by the German army for the GIs. I also cherish very much the boatload of random tapes i got from the closing of a video rental place in Japan... The tapes cost 50 cent each, ended up costing me a good $300 in excess weight at the airport (plus a bit of a sweat as i entered another store and they set off the alarms, causing an army of employees to cover them with alarm defusing bags!), but that stuff is actually priceless and you can't find it anywhere in the internet.
- crtasm 6y ago> you can't find it anywhere in the internet. would you have time to change that by uploading some (e.g. to archive.org) ?
- wazoox 6y agoMy son once grab on the street a huge crate of 80s movies on VHS next to a trash bin. He regularly uses them with his friends for ""80s nights" where they watch 80s action movies (a full set of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme movies), on VHS, on my CRT TV (bought in 2000, still going strong). Huge success among the youth.
- WalterBright 6y agoThe VHS tapes are actually more robust than DVDs are. A single scratch or scuff can render a DVD useless. A VHS will just soldier on if the tape gets creased and straightened, etc. VHS only looks bad if it is put on a big screen. Another thing great about VHS is you can get high end players for $5 at the thrift store !!
- agumonkey 6y agoBusiness idea: ML infused VCR player add-on to filter/upscale the output to your brand new 8K oled wall
- jcfrei 6y agoGreat idea but I guess it's going to take a while until you can do the upscaling in real-time.
- LocalH 6y agoI'd rather have the option for simulation of certain aspects of CRT displays, which at 4K and 8K should have a lot more room to work with to make it look as accurate as the technology actually allows.
- ddingus 6y agoOLED looks promising. For me the big things are speed and the color gamut glowing phosphors in tubes can deliver. Plasma and CRT displays have great color and are fast. Scan lines are cool too. Other things, blooming on super bright, or high contrast are less desirable, but yeah. I would enjoy seeing things in that way myself.
- aidenn0 6y agoPSA: scratched and scuffed DVDs can almost always be restored with a few seconds of buffing on a machine ( or a long time by hand). The reflective layers are in the middle of the medium, so unless it's a very deep gouge, it's probably fine. I've also noticed that laptop (and by extension, slim usb units) DVD and Blu-ray drives are much less capable of reading marginal media. I had one disc completely unreadable in a slim drive that played just fine in my set top, and also read out with a modest number of retries on my desktop.
- airhead969 6y agoIIRC, Mitsubshi VCRs were the later good ones in the 80's/90's. The rewind speeds were insanely fast. Earlier, Panasonic units were good in the mid 80's. I recall inheriting a 3-piece Panasonic VHS VTR-type camera (not a camcorder) system that had a separate camera, recorder/player, and control/tuner unit. It was roughly a VHS consumer analog of the Sony SL-F1 Betamax camera system. The tape unit was silver w silver buttons, bulky, and had a shoulder strap. It had a slow rewind speed. Super VHS (S-VHS) players weren't good enough to justify their costs.
- aidenn0 6y agoAll recordings of me as a kid were made on a similar 3 piece unit. The camera was much easier to use than integrated units because it was so much lighter.
- agumonkey 6y agoReminds me of this techmoan episode about HD VHS movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiu0LPeLQPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiu0LPeLQPE surprisingly nice
- kamranjon 6y agoThere was something about the era vhs was a part of that caused people to release stuff you just wouldn't see today. Small batch releases from small town churches of heavy metal laden clips interspersed with grainy pastors warning people of the devils hold on our youth. Hillariously cheesey square dancing tutorials with fully permed men and women. Strange and obscure indie animation that oozes with the grit and unabashed honesty of unfettered creativity. I love checking out the vhs section at thrift stores, and will often pick stuff up that seems like it'll give me an interesting porthole view into the past.
- lc9er 6y agoI think it was the combination of cheap technology (at least the blank tapes), and a low tech threshold. No reliance on software - you could just chain together VCRs and splice together a film.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoToday, wouldn't that kind of thing be on Youtube?
- cableshaft 6y agoRedLetterMedia on YouTube is still buying VHS tapes, for their 'Best of the Worst' series, where they watch old awful VHS tapes and point out what's hilarious about them (and pick the best ones). Especially when they do stuff like 'Wheel of the Worst', you can see everything from 'How to Carve Pumpkins' to 'Let's Rap About Fire Safety' to 'American Flatulators'
- regus 6y agoI am currently decluttering my house, which means getting rid of old books, board games, etc. I have a GIGANTIC box filled with DVDs. It is a big clunky and heavy box and I find the prospect of having to cart it around during my next move to be very unappealing. I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I just dump the whole thing at the good will, cherry picky only the best ones and get rid of the rest or maybe throw the cases away but store the disks in a binder? Going through this process of decluttering has made me seriously rethink the unbridled accumulation of stuff that I have been doing for the past few years. Hoarding a bunch of VHS tapes seems unthinkable to me.
- gregmac 6y agoA coworker, about 15 years ago, was telling me about bringing out some old VHS tapes for his kids. They were absolutely amazed at one particular feature: you could put the tape in and it would be at exactly where you left off! This was a great advancement, in their minds, compared to DVD/BluRay that always started at the beginning. I suppose that time has passed though. My own kid knows basically nothing but streaming (which also has that feature). We still have a BluRay player hooked up but I bet it's been used less than 5 times in the past half decade. Ironically, there's a bin full of old VHS in the basement somewhere, but I'm pretty sure we don't even have a player anymore. It would be fun to see the reaction though.
- dmh2000 6y agosince I can't get past the paywall, I'm guessing its the government and military. They have lots of legacy systems running on ancient hardware and the cost to upgrade is too high.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoa bit surprised that there was no discussion or mention in the article about the lifespan of VHS tapes - the deterioration/decay/degradation of the media itself posing a problem for preservation. I know they last a good while but there's definitely degradation after 30 years or whatever....which it has been if you're talking about golden era 80s stuff or whatever