RIP VHS (1975-2016)

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http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/07/ ... tion-ends/ - A little late, but after 40+ years in production, the last VHS player has rolled off the assembly line by Funai Electric, the last manufacture of them.

The VHS format lasted 41 years, outlasting Betamax by a few months, when Sony, the inventor of the format, ceased production of them without fanfare.

RIP VHS. Thanks for making the 1980s and 1990s awesome in so many ways.

I cant believe they were still being made even.

Yeah, they were still produced, but in much smaller quantities than 10-15 years ago.

As someone whose childhood and teens took place in a time where if you wanted to see a movie in the comfort of home, all you had was what three channels broadcast and the "newest" film was at least five years old....VHS and VCR players/recorders revolutionized my life!!

While I now prefer the superior quality of newer formats, thank you dear old VHS for that early miracle of when "home video" was new to us all. Rest in peace!

I still have a VCR and some old tapes. I never use it or them but I kind of want to keep them around.

My old TV had a built-in VCR. When it died in 2011, I retired from using VHS and switched fully to DVD/Blu-ray.

Just think, Pretty soon young people are going to say, 'What's a VHS? What's a VCR?'

With everything moving to the Internet, the idea of having a movie on a physical object is pretty much antiquated. It won't be long before blu-ray is dead.

I don't like the idea of movies and series only be available on the Internet, as it make them vulnerable to be "shut-down" from things like expiration of rights, lack of interest or censorship. The blu-ray also got the advantage of having lot of capacities (50 GB); more than what can be offered on streaming by Internet. The data capacity of physical objects could also explode with the introduction of some new non-volatile memory; which could happen soon.

Most of my college students were saying that five years ago. So, I brought a dead one to class and we did an autopsy on it to show them what went into building a VCR. They did learn to recycle them rather than to just throw them away.

You might not like it but it's the way things are going.
And downloading a movie in a format that doesn't allow "shut-down" (that's not the right term by the way) would solve that issue. The cost of hard drives is going down and the capacity is going up. 50gb is nothing. . People used to think that floppy disks had a high capacity.

Yes but digital copies can be deleted after a system crash or hard drive failure, you can lose them if your computer gets stolen etc. For all those reasons, I just prefer a hard copy that I can keep. Besides DVD's can also include extra stuff like deleted scenes, behind the scenes featurettes etc, all of which are cool.

Gee, I sure hope not. I prefer my DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Television couldn't kill radio, and it still hasn't, so I think we're safe.

The problem with everything becoming available only as streaming or downloading is that, if I'm not mistaken, internet service is becoming increasingly data-usage based instead of unlimited. While there are still unlimited data packages, they are often getting more and more expensive.

And other services that remain more affordable put a data usage cap that means no HD streaming is practical unless you want to pay high overage charges.

I can't afford hardwired broadband and my living situation may not always be stable, so I use a wi-fi dongle.Ipay a set monthly fee that's about as high as I can afford -- again I'm not in a great financial situation and I don't live with family.

My service only allows me 15 GB per month. That's plenty for surfing the web, posting on forums like this, e-mail, watching some Youtube stuff, etc.

But if I stream or download movies in HD, I can easily run over my data allowance. I once ran an SD movie but had to keep restarting it -- and I was hit with a bill for £50 overage charge.

That movie wound up costing me £50 to stream. I could have bought three blu-rays of it.

I fear the day when everything's from The Cloud as I just can't afford the data that would require.

Until two years ago, my mom still used VHS to record her soap operas when she wasn't home to watch them. People must've thought we were crazy to see these VHS tapes stacked in our living room. I'm currently in a process of recording all the VHS movies we have into digital video files, so that I'll be able to play them on a computer or burn them to DVDs, and not have to depend on VHS players.

I don't know why VHS became so popular when Betamax completely blows VHS out of the water with its picture quality.

VHS has gone the way of the flat vinyl disk and the phonograph needle (remember them?).

Vinyl disks are in a huge resurgence of popularity.....

Not saying VHS should enjoy the same. But vinyl is definitely very popular again.

I recorded a lot of things from 1998-2008, BTW. First learned how to record when I was 11.