Variety Declares VHS Dead

An anonymous reader writes "Variety has written an obituary for the VHS format only 3 years after it was surpassed in popularity by the DVD." While VHS is hardly the format of choice these days, there are still many, many home movies and other favorite recordings and commercial releases floating around in VHS. How long until VHS players themselves go the way of the 8-track player?

Comments

Variety Confirms It

[Tackhead]

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered VHS community when Variety confirmed that VHS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all pre-recorded video sales. Coming close on the heels of a recent Variety survey which plainly states that VHS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. VHS is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent video rental test market.

You don't need to be Jack Valenti to predict VHS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: VHS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for VHS because VHS is dying. Things are looking very bad for VHS. As many of us are already aware, VHS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood at the hand of the Boston Strangler.

VHS is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its market share. The sudden and unpleasant departures from the market of long time videotape manufacturers BASF and TDK only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: VHS is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Videotape market leader BASF states that there are 7000 video titles released on VHS. How many users of VHS are there? Let's see. The number of VHS versus Betamax results on Google is roughly in ratio of 198 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/198 = 35 Betamax users.

Crap. That sorta puts my parody of this little troll all to hell, doesn't it. Not that it'll stop you from reading this all the way to the end.

But all major surveys show that VHS has steadily declined in market share. VHS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If VHS is to survive at all it will be among obscure retro video format dabblers, like those weird motherfuckers who play around with CED (Capacitance Electronicc Disc) instead of something that could at least pretend to be sane, like Laserdisc. VHS continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save VHS from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, VHS is dead.

Fact: VHS is dying.