ABSTRACT
By the late 1970s, thanks to the availability of 8mm (and later Super 8) film and projectors, cineastes in Britain had been watching commercially released films in their homes for decades. The arrival of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) to the UK in 1978, however, completely revolutionized the ways that such images were consumed. Whereas 8mm/Super 8 (and, to a lesser extent, 16mm) constituted a decidedly niche market populated mostly by die-hard collectors (Greenberg 2008: 18), the influx of newfangled videocassette systems-comprising Sony’s Betamax, JVC’s Video Home System (VHS) and, for a short while, Philips’s V-2000-broadened the home-viewing market considerably, and afforded the general public a number of advantages that would further push film reels to the periphery. The biggest advantage was that, for the first time in history, consumers could now completely sidestep the rigidity of television scheduling, as video granted them the ability to record films (and other programs) directly off air (Greenberg 2008: 21). And whereas this practice-known as “time-shifting”—remained one of the main usages for home-video users in Britain in the 1980s (Levy and Gunter 1988; Gunter and Wober 1989), there was also a growing demand for feature films released on pre-recorded video cassettes; a demand that was met by an increasing number of video distributors and member-only video rental outlets (Gray 1992: 1; Kerekes and Slater 2000: 17-19; on the North American context, see Herbert 2014).
