From Betamax to Blockbuster : Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video

by Joshua M. Greenberg
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 2008
216 pp illus 15 b/w. Trade, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-262-07290-8.
Reviewed by José-Carlos Mariátegui and Jannis Kallinikos
London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK)

j.mariategui@lse.ac.uk


There are areas in the recent history of technology and media that are worth to be summarized, but due to their quotidian or “domestic” use, tend to be overlooked or treated as insignificant. Greenberg approaches the history of the VCR and the videotape by putting the consumer and what the author defines as industry intermediaries (retailers and film distributors) at the centre stage of his analysis. The author asserts in his introduction that most of the history of the VCR has predominantly been understood as a technical transformation. As a consequence, the role which social institutions have played in supporting and shaping the transformation and commercialization of VCR has often been bypassed or downplayed.

The book starts with a history of the use of the VCR in the consumer market. The story resembles the one of the microcomputer, the hobbyists around the technology and their communities. Particularly, Sony’s Betamax, the first technology introduced to the market became a device entangled with the interests of a community of enthusiasts and hobbyists that hacked the equipment, opening, tinkering and even disabling some of its restrictive features.

There are two key elements that Greenberg wants to single out and pinpoint in the book: first, how the VCR was refashioned from a “time-shifting” device to a medium for movie distribution; second, how this development was brought forward not by manufacturers or consumers, but by retailers and distributors. He describes these two groups of actors as being “in-between” consumers and manufacturers, and striving accordingly to stress the value of studying the “in-between” characteristics.

The study emphasises this matter by adopting what is usually referred to as social constructivism, drawing in particular on the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour and the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). In an ANT jargon, video distributors and retailers are described as Obligatory Passage Points (OPP) situated “in-between” manufacturers and the consumers. The author suggests that these actors are key institutional components for understanding the processes of video transformation. In a typical ANT gesture he then goes on generalizing the “in-betweenness” as a factor usually taken for granted in the social study of technologies. He conceives of the video stores as closure mechanisms that made possible the consolidation of the home-movie industry. As video distribution was done almost exclusively through video retailers, closure occurred because these retailers accepted a specific technology as a solution for home-movie distribution. The author mentions that these closure mechanisms were enabled by conventions, associations and outlets, which evolved into, mainstream franchises (such as Blockbuster). At the same time, the closure mechanism triggered the stabilization of a specific technology, the VHS tape, the medium of choice and the commercialization of VCRs at a massive scale.

No doubt, the author’s adoption of a social constructivist position produces some interesting insights. However, as we read on the book, it seems that social factors were not alone in shaping the development of the home-movie industry. Technology did seem to matter. Certainly not in the naïve, deterministically premised understanding, but in a far more subtle and crucially modal ways that need to be taken into account. This is evidenced by the current debacle of video stores that discloses their “closure mechanisms” as being contingent on a technology that with the advance of the Internet changed the way in which movies became distributed. It is not clear either whether Greenberg’s analysis can account for the role the user played in these developments. The author conceives of retailers and distributors as key actors of the transformation of the VCR from a time-shifting device to a device for pre-recorded movies consumption. However, throughout the book, the participation of the user seems much more important and decisive to such transformation. It is definitively the user who, through consumption patterns contributed to the redefinition of the use of the VCR. From hacking and tinkering on the early years of the VCR’s to today’s mixing and tagging of online video, the user has always participated in the definition of their media consumption habits. The steep consumption of online video (e.g. YouTube) as well as the vast amount of user-generated content (Web 2.0) makes also evident today the user’s role in the evolution of video consumption.

What seems very interesting in this account is the initial view of the VCR as a “time-shifting device” for viewing TV programs and its evolution towards the commercialization of tapes with pre-recorded content, mostly Hollywood movies. The manufacturers did not seem to play a key role in these developments. There were both the retailers and film distributors that thought of this use. Placed in this context, the battle between the two formats, Matsushita’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax is also well explained giving an interesting perspective with respect to the extinction of the latter. One revealing aspect might have been that movie retailers selected the VHS format because it had two-hour length in standard tapes, which enabled them to record complete movies. This suggests that technological characteristics must enter the explanatory framework. To put it bluntly, the battle has not been fought without but with the technology.

An interesting argument well pondered in the book is that the video retailers generated most of the culture of watching movies on tape at home, thus reversing the tradition of watching films in cinema theatres. However, as we can see today, film distributors have regained control over both the format and the distribution. For example, the recent struggle between Blue-ray and HD DVD has not been a battle for a better format, but about which of them has the better film content available (through contracts with film distributors). The DVD was indeed an important means for film distributors to regain the control of their products lost in the 1980s to retailers. It is not by chance that electronic companies own today some of the major film studios, as it is the case of Sony (who owns Columbia Pictures, BMG, MGM and United Artists). Conversely, the time-shifting conceptual failure of the original VCR’s was later taken as an opportunity for video recording device Tivo, creating the DVR (Digital Video Recorder) as one of the components of current home entertainment.

Greenberg mentions, in what we perceive as contradicting his theoretical framework, a distinction between the technologies and the movie itself by describing some characteristics seen on film that became problematic when transferred on to videotape. Not only the message is encoded differently, but also characteristics such as the aspect ratio of films and video are different. According to our view, some of these arguments are reasons why technology does matter and must therefore enter the analysis of transformations of the sort Greenberg analyzes. It is true that technological characteristics may be interpreted differently by social agents and technology users. Though the author asserts that the message is an essential component of the technological frame, we do think that the medium played a fundamental role in the evolution of video. Similarly, nowadays there are both technological as well as business criteria to take into consideration, such as the extra material available in videos (common on DVDs) to distinguish them from cinema-based movies.

Greenberg also mentions that his analysis moves away from the history of technology to an approach that focuses on the evolution and production of knowledge. However, the author does discuss some dead formats such as the Cartivision videocassette, which indeed had both technical and commercial backdrops behind its collapse (no rewind functionality, for example). To make his social construction argument more coherent, it would have been intellectually rewarding to compare the history of VCR with other technologies assessing in this process their impact and limitations. For example, the inception of the Laserdisc in the early 80’s, which gave movies the expanded role that we see today in the DVDs seems to be missing in his account. This story is undeniably associated with the pursuits of social agents. Be that as it may, it is worth noting that there are commercial as well as technological aspects that need to be taken into consideration.

It has become very frequent in recent accounts of the history of technology to draw on theoretical ideas that derive from what is commonly referred to as social constructivism. In such accounts the social component is usually exaggerated and the technological significantly downplayed. The unfortunate outcome is that the subtle and slippery issues that evolve around the interaction of technical characteristics with institutional and social factors are bypassed. Technology matters but of course not in an unproblematic and mechanistic way which social constructivists (aligned with their opponents) seem to assume. As we tried to depict in this brief review, technology is a crucial component that participates both as a means and an end in social and economic developments.