I recall VHS players becoming fairly commonplace back in the early 80s (81-82) however getting movies to watch required signing up at a rental club where they initially bought the films for $80-$100 and rented them out. I don’t think the studios made money off the rentals just the initial sale to the video store owner.
VHS movies weren’t marketed or retailed to the public till around 1987 (TopGun).
What took studios so long to tap this cash cow? You’d think someone like Sony or WB would have taken their entire film librarys in 83’, priced them at $16 a pop, put them in K-Mart and made billions.
What took them so long?
I can’t give an authoritative answer, but my impression is that the studios didn’t conceive of a demand for actual ownership of copies of movies—partly because in the past, people ‘rented’ the movie experience (by buying a ticket to a showing in a theater). So the studios figured that this is what people would want to continue doing: rent the experience of seeing the movie.
The studios figured their highest revenues would come from sales (with high per-unit prices) to rental-business owners. That basically paralleled the way studios made their money in the past.
It’s a basic example of lack of imagination. ‘What has been in the past is how it will continue to be’ and that sort of thing.
I’m old enough to remember the revolutionary impact of the first Tim Burton “Batman” movie’s cassette being priced at, I think, $10. Movies had never been available for much under $100 per cassette, before. That was the beginning (in the USA, anyway) of the concept of ordinary people owning ‘libraries’ of films.
You have to remember that this is the most corrupt industry on the face of the Earth. An industry that routinely makes ludicrous claims that billion dollar movies have never turned a profit. They were physically terrified of the very idea of losing physical control over movies. They fought VCRs every step of the way, even at some points demanding that they be paid money for the sale of blank cassettes on the claim that they would lose money from people recording movies and TV shows.
They were dead set against the idea to start with. After all, you can’t collect a percentage of the ticket price from every person who could look at the tape. And those people could look at it over and over again for free.
The studios turned around when they found out that the tapes that were marketed were selling like hotcakes, and the ones that weren’t released were being pirated. It was no biggie though, it just took a few years for the whole process to turn around. First the machines had to drop in price, rental chains with recognizable names had to open up, new contracts had to be developed. It didn’t really take that long.
Let’s not forget to praise that leader of innovation, porn. The first video stores survived off their porn rentals. The porn producers drove the development of high speed reproduction. The chain stores got their foothold by offering a porn free zone. The growth in the video rental market came from family oriented movies, and families didn’t like taking their kids to the video rental place with the special room in the back. Just as it did with the internet, and had done countless times through the ages, porn was the force propelling a new technology forward.
I do remember the enclosed “smut huts” and back rooms the independent video places used to wall off the porn from the family fare.
I remember Paramount dropped the bomb when they marketed some $19.95 titles (I think it was 19.95) Airplane and the Michael Jackson Thriller short.
They sold like hotcakes, we had to keep reordering. Then the trades started rumbling about other “temporary” price reductions. Then the flood gates opened, and the $79.95 list tape was doomed…