The humble VHS cassette beat Betamax and ruled living rooms for two decades
JVC launched Video Home System in September 1976, and within a few years a half-inch strip of magnetic tape had turned the family television into a private cinema. VHS won a bruising format war, fuelled the video rental boom, and hung on well after DVD arrived, with machines made until 2016.
Recording pictures on tape was nothing new. Broadcasters had used video tape recorders since the 1950s, but the first commercially successful one, the Ampex VRX-1000 of 1956, cost US$50,000, and a single 90-minute reel ran to US$300. Only studios could afford that.
Japan pushed the technology towards ordinary buyers. Kenjiro Takayanagi, a television pioneer serving as JVC's vice president, wanted cheaper machines for the domestic market; JVC built a two-head recorder in 1959 and released its long-serving DV220 in 1964. In 1969 JVC joined Sony and Matsushita, its majority owner until 2011, to agree a consumer standard. The result, U-matic, appeared in 1971 as the first cassette system shared across manufacturers, yet high prices and short running times kept it mostly in offices and newsrooms. Each partner then went its own way: Sony towards Betamax, Matsushita towards VX. At JVC, engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano assembled a team in 1971 to build a recorder for homes.
Their cassette held 12.7 mm tape wound between two spools and usually recorded for at least two hours. That combination helped VHS defeat Sony's Betamax and several rival tapes, and its fortunes became tied to shops renting out pre-recorded films. Better formats such as S-VHS and the optical LaserDisc never caught on worldwide, which only extended the older system's life.
Decline set in during the late 1990s once DVD appeared, and American rental revenue from discs overtook tapes in 2003. Combination players eased the switch, and hard-disk recorders took over home taping in the 2000s. Collectors have since given the format a small second life: a 2026 film, This Is How The World Ends, became the first release to go straight to VHS in two decades.
Source: VHS
