Product Code Database
Home video is recorded media sold or rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD and Blu-ray. In a different usage, "home video" refers to amateur video recordings, also known as home movies.
Released in 1978, LaserDisc (LD) is another home video format, which never managed to gain widespread use on North American and European retail markets due to high cost of the players and their inability to record TV programs (unlike the VHS), although it retained some popularity among videophiles and Cinephilia during its lifespan; the format had greater prevalence in some regions of Southeast Asia such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia where it was better supported. Film titles were released in LD format until 2001, production of LD players ceased in 2009.
The home video business distributes films, television series, telefilms and other audiovisual media to the public in the form of videos in various formats, either bought or rented and then watched privately in purchasers' homes. Most theatrically released films are now released on digital media (both optical and download-based), replacing the largely obsolete videotape medium. , the Video CD format remained popular in Asia. DVDs have been gradually losing popularity since the late 2010s and early 2020s, when streaming media became mainstream for the audiences, with most media consumers in urban areas globally having domestic Internet access.
After the quick failures of these early attempts at home viewing, most feature films were essentially inaccessible to the public after their original theatrical runs. For most of the 20th century, the idea that ordinary consumers could own copies of films and watch them at their convenience in their own homes "was beyond the grasp of reasonable expectations." Some very popular films were given occasional theatrical re-releases in urban and the screening rooms of a few archives and museums. Beginning in the 1950s, most could be expected to be broadcast on television, eventually. During this era, television programs normally could only be viewed at the time of broadcasting. Viewers were accustomed to the fact that there was no easy way to record television shows at home and watch them whenever desired.
In 1924, Kodak invented 16 mm film, which became popular for home use, and then later developed 8 mm film. After that point, the public could purchase a film projector for one of those film formats and rent or buy home-use prints of some cartoons, short comedies, and brief "highlights" reels edited from feature films. The Super 8 film format, introduced in 1965, was marketed for making home movies, but it also boosted the popularity of show-at-home films. Eventually, longer, edited-down versions of feature films were issued, which increasingly came in color and with a magnetic soundtrack, but in comparison to modern technologies, film projection was still quite expensive and difficult to use. As a result, home viewing of films remained limited to a small community of dedicated hobbyists willing and able to invest large amounts of money in projectors, screens, and film prints, and it therefore made little revenue for film companies.
In 1956, Ampex pioneered the first commercially practical videotape recording system. The Ampex system, though, used reel-to-reel tape and physically bulky equipment not suitable for home use.
In the mid-1970s, videotape became the first truly practical home-video format with the development of , which were far easier to use than tape reels. The Betamax and VHS home videocassette formats were introduced, respectively, in 1975 and 1976, but several more years and significant reductions in the prices of both equipment and videocassettes were needed before both formats started to become widespread in households.
The first company to duplicate and distribute feature films from major film studios on home video was Magnetic Video. Magnetic Video was established in 1968 as an audio and video duplication service for professional audio and television corporations in Farmington Hills, Michigan. After Betamax was launched in the United States in 1976, Magnetic Video chief executive Andre Blay wrote letters to all the major film studios offering to license the rights to their films. Near the end of 1977, Magnetic Video entered into a first-of-its-kind deal with 20th Century Fox. Magnetic Video agreed to pay Fox a royalty of $7.50 per unit sold and a guaranteed annual minimum payment of $500,000 in exchange for nonexclusive rights to 50 films, which had to be at least two years old and had already been broadcast on network television.
Home video was born, initially, as a rental business. Film studios and video distributors assumed that the overwhelming majority of consumers would not want to buy prerecorded videocassettes, but would merely rent them. They felt that virtually all sales of videocassettes would be to video rental stores and set prices accordingly. According to Douglas Gomery, studio executives thought that the handful of consumers actually interested in purchasing videocassettes in order to watch them again and again would be similar to the small community of film buffs who for decades had willingly paid hundreds of dollars to purchase release prints. Therefore, in 1977, Magnetic Video originally priced its videocassettes at $50 to $70 each—a princely sum at a time when the average price of an American movie ticket was $2.23—and sold them only to wholesalers capable of handling a minimum order of $8,000. When the American home video market suddenly took off like a rocket, Fox bought Magnetic Video in 1978 and turned the company into its home video division.
The home video market grew rapidly along with the widespread acquisition of affordable videocassette recorders by the majority of households during the 1980s. For example, in 1978, the total number of VCRs purchased to date at wholesale in the United States was only 402,000, the average wholesale price of a VCR was $811, and the percentage of television-owning households with a VCR was unknown but probably just above zero. By 1992, the respective numbers for each of these categories were 105,502,000, $239, and 75.6%.
During the 1980s, video rental stores became a popular way to watch home video. Video rental stores are physical retail businesses that rent home videos such as movies and prerecorded TV shows (sometimes also selling other media, such as video game copies on disc). Typically, a rental shop conducts business with customers under conditions and terms agreed upon in a rental agreement or contract, which may be implied, explicit, or written. Many video rental stores also sell previously viewed movies and/or new unopened movies. In the 1980s, video rental stores rented films in both the VHS and Betamax formats, although most stores stopped using Betamax tapes when VHS won the format war late in the decade. The shift to home viewing radically changed revenue streams for film companies, because home renting provided an additional window of time in which a film could make money. In some cases, films that performed only modestly in their theater releases went on to sell significantly well in the rental market (e.g., cult films).
During the 1980s, video distributors gradually realized that many consumers did want to build their own video libraries, and not just rent, if the price was right. Rather than sell a few thousand units at a wholesale price of $70 into the rental channel, video distributors could sell hundreds of thousands of units at a wholesale price of $15-20 into the retail "sell-through" channel. By "slashing prices and making up in volume what it loses in margin", The New York Times reported in 1983, Paramount Pictures had two of the top three best-selling videotapes and six of the top 20 rentals.
The "ultimate accelerant" for the rise of the "sell-through" home video market was the development of children's home video. The pre-1980s conventional wisdom that consumers had no interest in watching the same films again and again at home turned out to be entirely wrong with respect to children. Many harried parents discovered that it was a good investment to pay $20 to purchase a videocassette that could reliably keep their children riveted to the television screen for over an hour—and not just one time, but many, many times. The Walt Disney Company recognized that its flagship animation studio's family-friendly films were superbly positioned to conquer the home video market, and through its home video division, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the company did just that during the 1980s and 1990s. This spectacular success "catapulted the head of Disney's video division, Bill Mechanic, into executive stardom." In 1994, Mechanic left Disney to become head of Fox Filmed Entertainment. Another executive, Bob Chapek, would later ascend through the ranks of Disney's home video division to become chief executive officer of the entire company in 2020, and for that reason (before his sudden 2022 departure) was called "the home entertainment industry's single biggest success story."
Special-interest video increased to larger audiences the number of topics, including "...dog handling videos, back pain videos and cooking videos", which were not previously thought of as marketable. Next, even "golf and skiing tapes* started selling. Contemporary sources noted, "new technology has changed the territory" of the home video market.
Though DVDs do not have the problems of videocassettes, such as breakage of the tape or the cassette mechanism, they can still be damaged by scratches. Another advantage from the perspective of video rental stores is that DVDs are physically much smaller, so they take less space to store. DVDs also offer a number of advantages for the viewer: DVDs can support both standard 4:3 and widescreen 16:9 screen-aspect ratios, and can provide twice the video resolution of VHS. Skipping ahead to the end is much easier and faster with a DVD than with a VHS tape (which has to be rewound). DVDs can have interactive menus, multiple language tracks, audio commentaries, closed captioning, and subtitling (with the option of turning the subtitles on or off, or selecting subtitles in several languages). Moreover, a DVD can be played on a computer.
Due to all these advantages, by the mid 2000s, DVDs had become the dominant form of prerecorded video movies in both the rental film and new movie markets. In the late 2000s, stores began selling Blu-ray discs, a format that supports high definition.: A UHD Blu-ray disc player was also released.]]
Blu-ray is a digital media optical disc data storage format, designed to supersede the DVD format, and is capable of storing several hours of video in high definition (HDTV 720p and 1080p). The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as and for the physical distribution of video games. The plastic disc is the same size as DVDs and .
Blu-ray was officially released on June 20, 2006, beginning the high-definition optical disc format war, in which Blu-ray Disc competed against the HD DVD format. Toshiba, the main company supporting HD DVD, conceded in February 2008. Blu-ray has competition from video on demand (VOD) and the continued sale of DVDs. As of January 2016, 44% of U.S. broadband households had a Blu-ray player.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, people continued to use VCRs to record over-the-air TV shows, because they could not make home recordings onto DVDs. This problem with DVD was resolved in the late 2000s, when inexpensive DVD recorders and other digital video recorders (DVRs)which record shows onto a hard disk or flash storagebecame available to purchase and rent.
Despite the mainstream dominance of DVD, VHS continued to be used, albeit less frequently, throughout the 2000s; decline in VHS use continued during the 2010s. The switch to DVD initially led to mass-selling of used VHS videocassettes, which were available at used-goods stores, typically for a much lower price than the equivalent film on a used DVD. In July 2016, the last known manufacturer of VCRs, Funai, announced that it was ceasing VCR production.
Netflix's primary business is its subscription-based streaming service, which offers online streaming of a library of films and television programs, including those produced in-house. As of April 2019, Netflix had over 148 million paid subscriptions worldwide, including 60 million in the United States, and over 154 million subscriptions total, including free trials. It is available worldwide except in mainland China (due to local restrictions), Syria, North Korea, and Crimea (due to U.S. sanctions). The company also has offices in India, the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. Netflix is a member of the Motion Picture Association. Netflix began producing media itself in 2012 and since then took more of an active role as producer and distributor for both films and television series.
Following the launch of various streaming services during the early 2020s, in particular those operated by the major Hollywood studios, home video continued to decline. One of the most prominent examples of this effect was with Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment which, following the launch of Disney+ in 2019 and its international expansion in the following years, began to discontinue physical distribution entirely in certain regions such as Latin America, Asia (excluding Japan), Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Hungary, or to outsource its activities to other regional distributors (like Divisa Home Video for Spain, Eagle Pictures for Italy, Leonine Studios for Germany, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for North America.
Exceptions to the rule include the Steven Soderbergh film Bubble, which was released in 2006 to theaters, cable television, and DVD only a few days apart. Netflix has released some of its films, such as Roma and The Irishman, in limited theatrical release followed by streaming availability after less than 30 days.
| 2004 ! scope="row" | "Pier Paolo Pasolini - Les Années 60" | Carlotta Films ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2005 ! scope="row" | "Alexandre Medvedkine" | Arte ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2006 ! scope="row" | Entuziazm | Österreichisches Filmmuseum ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2007 ! scope="row" | "Ernst Lubitsch Collection" | Transit Film-Murnau Stiftung ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2008 ! scope="row" | L'argent The Threepenny Opera | Carlotta Films The Criterion Collection ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2009 ! scope="row" | "Joris Ivens Wereldcineast" | European Foundation Joris Ivens ! scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2010 ! scope="row" | "By Stan Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two" | The Criterion Collection ! scope="row" | La Rosa di Bagdad Mention | Cinecittà Istituto Luce |
| 2011 ! scope="row" | "Segundo de Chomón 1903 – 1912" | Filmoteca de Catalunya and Cameo Media s.l. ! scope="row" | "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story" Mention | The Criterion Collection |
| 2012 ! scope="row" | "The Complete Humphrey Jennings Volume 2: Fires Were Started" | British Film Institute ! scope="row" | "A Hollis Frampton Odyssey" | The Criterion Collection |
| 2013 ! scope="row" | Gli ultimi | La Cineteca del Friuli ! scope="row" | Lonesome | The Criterion Collection |
| 2014 ! scope="row" | " Džim Švantė (Sol' Svanetii) & Gvozd' v sapoge" | Edition Filmmuseum ! scope="row" | Underground | British Film Institute |
| 2015 !scope="row" | " The House of Mystery (La Maison du mystère)" | Flicker Alley, LLC The Blackhawk Films Collection !scope="row" | " The Connection: Project Shirley Clarke, Volume One" " Portrait of Jason: Project Shirley, Volume Two" " : Project Shirley, Volume 3" | Milestone Films |
| 2016 !scope="row" | "Frederick Wiseman Intégrale Vol. 1" | Blaq Out !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2017 !scope="row" | The Salvation Hunters | Edition Filmmuseum !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2018 !scope="row" | "Arne Sucksdorff: Samlade Verk" | Studio S Entertainment !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2019 !scope="row" | Non contate su di noi | Penny Video Cineteca Nazionale Cineploit !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2020 !scope="row" | Fragment of an Empire | Flicker Alley, LLC !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2021 !scope="row" | La Roue | Pathé Films !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2022 !scope="row" | Häxan | Potemkine Film !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2023 !scope="row" | Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 4 | The Criterion Collection !scope="row" | N/A | |
| 2024 !scope="row" | "American Trilogy — Michael Roemer" | Les Films du Camélia !scope="row" | N/A |
|
|
