Fifty years ago, a plastic brick turned the movie business upside down.
In June 1975, while everybody was fixated on the mechanical shark in Jaws, Sony quietly introduced an even more impressive machine: the Betamax LV-1901 — the first consumer VCR. The massive gizmo came embedded in a Trinitron TV console, weighed nearly as much as a Pinto and cost as much, too ($2,495, or $15,000 today). But it let you do something revolutionary: record TV and watch it whenever you wanted.
Sony pitched it as a domestic peace treaty — “the end of the war of the channels” — but The New York Times dismissed it as a toy for “wealthy faddists.”
Then George Atkinson arrived on the scene. A projector-rental guy with a storefront on Wilshire Boulevard, Atkinson had a hunch. In 1977, he scraped together $10,000 to buy one copy each of the 50 Fox titles available on Beta and VHS and offered to rent them for $10 a night (plus a $50 annual membership). Within days, thousands of customers were signing up at his shop, the first videotape rental store on earth.
Sony’s C7 model Betamax, circa 1980.
SSPL/Getty Images
Hollywood panicked. Universal and Disney sued to have VCRs banned. When that failed, they tried to outlaw renting movies. The battle went to the Supreme Court — which ruled in 1984 that, yes, rewinding was legal.
By then, Atkinson’s store had grown into the 600-location Video Station chain, part of a booming 15,000-store industry. Studios pivoted. “It’s like getting hooked on chocolate,” Paramount exec Mel Harris told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “The more you get, the more you want.”
Then came DVDs in the U.S. in 1997 and made the boom bigger. For a while, home video propped up Hollywood’s bottom line and paid for its risks. “The DVD was a huge part of our revenue stream,” Matt Damon later said. “When that went away, that changed the type of movies we could make.”
Press play, America. This is where binge culture began.
This story appeared in the June 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.