Huh, that sounds very different from my experience. Everyone taped from TV, and traded tapes, even people who couldn’t set the time or schedule it. People were so desperate for time-shifting away from TV broadcast schedule and to share videos that they sat through entire shows to record them. There were frequent glitches from people trying to not record commercials, before commercial skipping technology became common. This was also the only reasonable way to have a movie collection, given the obscene prices of movies on tape. And of course child me thought I was clever to figure out how to schedule a recording, only to be frequently screwed up by sports and political events running long - I’d schedule an extra hour and sometimes that wasn’t enough
Apologies for not being entirely clear about the recording experience, but to be honest you hinted at the point I was trying to make.
Below you used “time-shifting”. I would argue until DVRs became a thing in the US in the early 2000s, users were not truly able to gain any time with VHS or Betamax. This point is important for people too young to know about a world without DVRs or streaming. A VHS recorder could record but it was too difficult for most and problematic for those who knew how to use the scheduled recording features. Yes there were options to record 30 mins extra but there were no commercial skipping functions to speak of.
Huh, that sounds very different from my experience. Everyone taped from TV, and traded tapes, even people who couldn’t set the time or schedule it. People were so desperate for time-shifting away from TV broadcast schedule and to share videos that they sat through entire shows to record them. There were frequent glitches from people trying to not record commercials, before commercial skipping technology became common. This was also the only reasonable way to have a movie collection, given the obscene prices of movies on tape. And of course child me thought I was clever to figure out how to schedule a recording, only to be frequently screwed up by sports and political events running long - I’d schedule an extra hour and sometimes that wasn’t enough
Apologies for not being entirely clear about the recording experience, but to be honest you hinted at the point I was trying to make.
Below you used “time-shifting”. I would argue until DVRs became a thing in the US in the early 2000s, users were not truly able to gain any time with VHS or Betamax. This point is important for people too young to know about a world without DVRs or streaming. A VHS recorder could record but it was too difficult for most and problematic for those who knew how to use the scheduled recording features. Yes there were options to record 30 mins extra but there were no commercial skipping functions to speak of.