Some people say I cling too much to the past, but recently I abandoned my broken video at an electrical recycling centre, and if that’s not proof of being able to move on, I don’t know what is.
When I say video, I mean my last VHS player or VCR, two terms I never used during the lifespan of the technology, when it was always just “the video”, there to be set.
The broken video – actually a combined Sony DVD/VHS player-recorder – had been under my bed for a solid 17 years, but then the bed had to go, leaving the video exposed to low winter sun and an inevitable reckoning. After some months sealed up in the hallway, poised for departure, I transferred it to a forlorn council-supervised pallet, where it began its afterlife in the company of a retired waffle-maker and some shards of glass.
I had a vague memory that it was the fly-by-night DVD tray that had been the source of its misbehaviour
Before I said my final goodbye, I checked that it was definitely defunct, salvaging a scart lead from my stash of emergency scart leads, then rubbing a cloth around the tape flap with no real hope or strategy at all. I had a vague memory that it was the fly-by-night DVD tray that had been the source of its misbehaviour, but my cajoling was to no avail. I’d lost the art of video-whispering, probably sometime around 2007.
I’ve still got my tapes though – I’m not a philistine.
My once-blank video cassettes, which I now know for sure I have no means to play, live on at the back of a climate-uncontrolled wardrobe, next to their audio equivalents, where they function as rattling reminders of an era when “tape” was one of the best verbs in the English language.
This was because of the control it signified. You could tape joy, press play on it, then rewind it and play it again – for video, the novelty of this was bliss in 1987. With precision timing, children of my generation strung together pop-culture montages from the early days of cable and satellite when it already seemed like there was enough joyous television to want to preserve as much of it as possible, yet not enough to be indifferent to its presence.
I’d kept my tapes, complete with their intricate sticker-led cataloguing system
My hoarding meant I’d retained VHS copies of family camcorder videos, initially filmed on Super 8, that my sister could send off to a digitising service to be reinvented as a USB key.
But I’d kept my tapes, complete with their intricate sticker-led cataloguing system, because I thought one day I might like to relive the parts of my identity formation that YouTube and Top of the Pops repeats can’t reach.
Now it’s their cardboard covers – a festival of vintage marketing claims and late-century graphic design – that seem the real time-capsule contenders to me.
Sony’s “Hi Resolution” E-180 (three-hour) tape, for instance, advertises vivid colour, while insisting that it is “anti-fungus”. A JVC box stresses that its cassettes can only be used in VHS recorders, which it invented, the subtext here being “none of your loser (Sony-developed) Betamax machines”.
A later cover from Big Cassette company TDK, originally the producer of a magnetic material called ferrite, assures that its tapes are “for daily use” beside an image of a dolphin leaping out from a cathode ray tube.
The winner, seen on various boxes, is the promise of a ‘lifetime guarantee’
This was the era when TV cabinets were stuffed with the brands of chemical companies, including German giant BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, which once sold tapes in indigo boxes that could be that most brilliant of things: E-240.
The winner, seen on various boxes, is the promise of a “lifetime guarantee”. This was intended to counter the expectation that picture and sound on magnetic tape would deteriorate over time, with constant re-recording hastening the process. Blank cassettes were like workhorses – at high risk of burnout.
As it transpired, few people used their videos long enough for this to become any kind of problem. It was VHS that needed a lifetime guarantee, not the technical quality of the videotape. A cover from 3M-owned Scotch allows for this fate, pledging to replace any degraded cassettes “provided that the tape format is still in normal use”.
In media, concepts such as audience fragmentation, user curation, on-demand consumption and even personal video documentation are sometimes spoken about as though they are 21st century phenomena, rather than accelerations of trends that began in the days of tape. This is my way of confessing that despite spending a surprising amount of time defending the existence of RTÉ as an adult, I scarcely watched any of it as a child.
Media companies that once owned their primary means of distribution – the transmission networks, the printing presses – have lost control too
Still, the lesson to take from Peak Video hinges on that cherished sense of control. Recording on to DVDs was an optional rebound relationship. Most people segued from videocassettes to the hard drives of their set-top boxes, which offered limited storage and killed social swapping. Now those hard drives are themselves under threat in the age of streaming TV. Only a minute ago, pay-TV companies were excitably promoting the capacity to record up to six channels at once. In 2025, such a line seems as anachronistic as the ones found on cassette boxes.
Media companies that once owned their primary means of distribution – the transmission networks, the printing presses – have lost control too. They have become tenants of the internet along with everyone else. This seems a bit bumpy, a touch murky, not “Hi Resolution” at all.
But it’s time to skip to the end. This is my 583rd column in this slot and the one on which I must press the eject button. Writing is a strange, ephemeral business, which is why I will continue to do it on another page – I love strange ephemera. The future conspicuously lacks lifetime guarantees and, indeed, anti-fungal properties. All I know for sure is, though I might keep my surviving tapes, I’m done rewinding them.
