The End of VHS: The Creaky Ghost of Christmas Past

So says the LA Times:

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”

Hollywood hate turned to love:

If you rewind back to the 1980s, VHS represented a remarkable turning point for the American consumer. For the first time, Hollywood’s classics and its recent hits could be rented and watched at home.

“It was a sea change,” says Leonard Maltin, the film critic and author who has written stacks of books to meet the consumer need for video recommendations. “Hollywood thought it would hurt movie ticket sales, but it didn’t deter people from going to movies; in fact, it only increased their appetite for entertainment. Hollywood also thought it would just be a rental market, but then when someone had the idea of lowering the prices, the people wanted to own movies. They wanted libraries at home, and suddenly VHS was a huge part of our lives.”

Left unsaid is that VHS put video production in the hands of the people in a big way for the first time as VHS camcorders spread across the land. Nearly every one of those eighties babies is now an ’00-YouTube producer! And their parents’ video of their babies’ first Christmases will soon be gone.

REMEMBER: Don’t just store it, move it.