But VHS was more than an economic juggernaut. It was tactile culture. The ritual of sliding a cassette from its sleeve, blowing dust from the plastic window, and pressing rewind was part of the viewing experience. “Be kind, rewind” wasn’t just a sticker—it was etiquette, a reminder that media was physical and shared. Tapes warped if left in the sun, got fuzzy after dozens of plays, and sometimes snapped outright, leaving a ribbon of magnetic tape to be spliced with Scotch tape in an act of home surgery. The imperfections themselves became memories: the static burst during your favorite cartoon, the crooked tracking lines that signaled a tape’s overuse, the handwriting on a label fading with time.
The format also reshaped our habits of consumption. Rental stores like Blockbuster exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, democratizing access but also policing taste; controversially removing scenes, selling off old movies, walls of new releases, lenticular horror movie covers, and borrowed video games and consoles. Late fees became family legends, and the video store became a social hub where aisles doubled as cultural battlegrounds—Schwarzenegger or Stallone? Horror aisle or Comedy shelf? Owning tapes meant prestige; renting them meant discovery. Both cultivated the sense that media was finite, that you had to choose carefully because you could not scroll endlessly; you held an object.
And VHS altered the relationship between consumers and corporations in ways that echo today. The Betamax ruling did not just protect time-shifting; it laid groundwork for the legal battles over Napster in the 2000s, MGM vs Grokster in 2005, YouTube in the 2010s, and even TikTok today. Each fight boils down to the same tension: do individuals control their media, or do corporations? VHS taught a generation that we could tape, copy, and archive for ourselves. Streaming reverses that logic, restoring control to the distributors. The Millenium copyright act allowed us to make digital copies of music, but not our movies.
Today, the gatekeepers look different. Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube giveth and taketh away: altering lineups, pulling shows, demonetizing creators, and erasing digital footprints. We’ve already seen entire films disappear from streaming platforms because a studio calculated that a tax write-off was worth more than cultural availability.