THE ABC CINEMA Sheffield

[LeadFarmer]

Interesting post Hopman.

Video rental shops, whilst commonplace during my childhood in the 80's cant have lasted long if they only started in the early 80's. There was a large video rental store at the bottom of The Moor on Cumberland St.

[Hopman]

Back in the early 80s for the price of a cinema seat you could hire a videocassette for the whole family to watch. The machines were expensive to buy, but you could also rent them. The video tapes themselves were around £35 a throw, so that contributed to the rise of the rental shops. As production increased, the price of the machines and the tapes dropped to a point where buying the tapes was a viable option. Why hire an "old" rental copy when a brand new one was in pristine condition?

One advantage the VCRs had was their ability to record one channel while you watched another channel. Recorded quality was comparable to that of the original broadcast. Some people took an audio feed out of the VCR and fed it into their home hi-fi system to get better sound quality than the TV set.

[MartinR]

Timed recording was another thing.  You could record overnight programmes (like the OU) and replay them later when you were awake.  What eventually killed the tapes was the emergence of the DVD.  Most people wanted to watch films rather than time shift, and the DVD machines were cheaper, more reliable and the DVDs themselves cheaper to make and of better quality.