Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

Before you were able to watch YouTube clips on your iPhone and DVDs in your car, there was an important little machine known as a videocassette recorder, or VCR for short. Today (June 7th) on VCR Day, we celebrate this crucial technological development that helped make movies and TV shows available for home viewing at the convenience of the viewer.

The second question people ask about VCR Day (right after “What’s a VCR?”) is usually “Why is it celebrated on June 7th?” An intensive scouring of the Internet revealed that Sony supposedly made the Betamax VCR available for public purchase today in 1975. We were unable to corroborate this factoid, however, so we suggest taking that with a grain of salt.

To answer the first question about VCR Day, a VCR is a device that records audio and video signals from a television broadcast or other signal source onto a videocassette containing magnetic tape. The videocassette can then be played in the VCR, allowing the viewer to watch the recorded TV program or movie at any time.

VCRs and videocassettes have been around since the 1950s, but they didn’t become affordable for the average consumer until the 1970s. By this time, several different videocassette formats were vying for control of the market. Each format was compatible only with its own VCR, so you could not, for example, play a VHS videocassette in a Betamax machine.

VHS and Betamax emerged as the major competitors in the VCR market, with VHS winning out as the standard format in most markets. VHS videocassettes boasted longer recording times than their Betamax counterparts, which was a bigger draw for consumers than the superior picture quality offered by Betamax.

The increasing popularity of VCRs engendered a certain amount of concern amongst TV and movie executives, who worried that VCRs would encourage the public to privately record copyrighted materials for which they would otherwise have to pay.

Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler, claiming that the VCR posed the same threat to film producers that the Boston Strangler posed to a woman home alone. The booming home video industry, however, soon convinced film and TV executives that the VCR wasn’t quite that bad.

Videocassettes have since given way to DVD, Blu-ray, and digital video formats, but the VCR remains an important step in the history of video recording.

We suggest celebrating VCR Day with a videocassette screening of your favorite movie from before 2006, when the last major movies were released on VHS. For an extra touch of nostalgia, heat up some Jiffy Pop (the precursor to microwave popcorn) to enjoy during the show.

Daily TWiP appears Monday through Saturday courtesy of The Week in Preview. Read more of both at www.nashuatelegraph.com/columnists/weekinpreview.

– Teresa Santoski

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