VHS era winds down as demand drops, distribution stops
Rewind, eject, extinct
12/26/2008
With a whir and a great big clunk, the tape has pretty much finished spooling on VHS format.
The last major distributor of VHS tapes, Distribution Video Audio Inc. in Florida, stopped shipping them in the fall. And one of the last Santa Fe holdouts providing the format to renters, Casablanca Video, is planning to take all remaining VHS tapes off its shelves after Dec. 31, said owner Bruce Smith.
"There's just not enough demand for it," Smith said. "VHS rentals only make up about 1 percent of our business, but they take up about 20 percent of our shelf space."
In Santa Fe, where real estate is always at a premium, he'd rather fill that space with DVDs he can more easily rent out, Smith said.
But that's just the nature of video and audio recordings — formats change, sometimes too rapidly, he said.
Remember 8-track tapes? Microcassettes? Betamax? Laser disks?
Technology's been responsible for a mess of format changes ever since the gramophone record replaced the phonograph cylinder back in 1895.
And while it's sad to think that some of the films on VHS will never be released on DVD, it's just the nature of the business that you have to provide what people want in the format they want it on, Smith said.
"I'm over it now," Smith said. "We used to have over 50,000 different movies on VHS. It was a 30-year business. We've had to replace as much of our library as we could on DVD, but we're still not even close to having that many titles."
Still, all is not lost for the VHS aficionado. Santa Fe die-hards can still find a selection at The Video Library, 120 E. Marcy St. No. 1, which plans to keep renting the tapes for the foreseeable future, owner Lisa Harris said.
"We have a lot of people that only still have a VHS player," Harris said. "Some people prefer them, because they're not jerky like DVDs can be when you get a thumbprint or something on them."
At the store Friday morning, a handful of visitors browsed and rented some the selection of about 7,000 VHS movies.
One of them, Britt Darby, a musician, said he's extremely sad to see the format go. He had about $100,000 worth of equipment that used old tape formats, and now it's all obsolete and sitting in his parent's basement in Iowa, he said. "Technology's getting way ahead of itself," Darby said. "The quality of these new formats, it's not as good, and they don't have control of it yet."
He's worried about old VHS tapes he has of his daughter when she was a baby — that they'll crumble or he'll have no way to play them anymore, he said.
And unfortunately, he's probably right, said Michael Caditz, owner of Fast Forward Digital, a Santa Fe company that transfers old media to new formats such as DVD, compact disc or computer files.
"There's two things compelling people to do this," Caditz said of his business, which has been steady since he founded it a year ago. "One is that the technology has become antiquated, and it's harder to find players. The other thing is it's harder to preserve the media."
Salvaging old VHS tapes and even older format material, such as reel-to-reel tapes, is as much an art as it is a science, he said. And the older things get, the harder they are to save, he added.
"You don't just put them in a machine and push a button; it requires attention," Caditz said. "If you know what you're doing, you can improve the quality sometimes, but sometimes it requires a lot of attention just to maintain the quality as it is."
Darby is afraid to play any of his old VHS tapes for fear they'll be destroyed, he said.
But he's also afraid to go to a new format because he likes the quality of the older formats better. "All they're trying to do is cram more information onto a smaller and smaller format," Caditz said. "And in the process, something gets lost."
If you just have to have your movie collection on VHS, though, buying the tapes soon is a good idea.
Smith is planning several sidewalk sales over the coming months to dump his stock of VHS tapes. He may also try selling some of his rarer movies on eBay, the last bastion for old media and other outdated household junk.
And it probably won't be the last time he has to shift his entire stock to something new, Smith added with a sigh.
"Blu-ray is still too expensive, but I'm sure one day, all of a sudden, we'll be ordering Blu-ray discs instead of DVDs — and we'll have to start this process all over again," Smith said.
Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.
A QUICK DEMISE
• Not long after the arrival of DVDs in the late 1990s, VHS rentals were eclipsed by DVD in 2003.
• By the end of 2005, DVD sales were more than $22 billion and VHS was slumping badly but still viable enough to pull in $1.5 billion.
• The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2006. By that point, major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves.
Los Angeles Times