I believe that this is my ninth entry in the Object Lessons series, short books that focus on the hidden history of everyday objects. Although the concept is excellent, I have had a very up and down relationship with the series, it seems that I alternate between “very interesting” and “not at all”. “Videotape” by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy definitely fits the former, as it tells the rapid rise and fall of a piece of technology that really changed how the world interacts with media and the arts.

For someone my age, the rise of the videotape came right before I was starting high school, so I was a teenager through most of this story. At first marketed as a tool to help you watch TV when you had time, it eventually became a way to enjoy prerecorded content such as movies, exercise videos, and (of course) pornography. From the early days of the war between Betamax and VHS, to the black-market distribution behind the iron curtain, the videotape changed what, when, and how people watched media, the control was now in the hands of the consumer which eventually led to the on-demand world we live in today. Various fights about copyright and fair use and media ownership led to the explosion of content that is still with us today, for better and for worse. With the rise of DVDs and then digital recordings, the VHS tape soon faded into history, leaving behind quite a legacy, not to mention boxes of videotapes in everybody’s basements and storage units!

A great history that shows us how our modern world was shaped by many inventions over the past few decades. It is also nice that the story tells us about the global issues, not just the USA.

I requested and received a free advanced electronic copy from Bloomsbury Academic via NetGalley. Thank you!

One of those books from this mahoosive series that cover the everyday world of objects you probably never expected to read a whole book on – although for people like me, of a certain age, this really struggles to fit into that category. Why wouldn't we read a book about them – they were the be-all and end-all of our home viewing? VHSs were predominant in many a youth, especially when British TV broadcasts finally filled the day with something like 24 hours of material – for some regions, at least. This, we learn here, was the initial selling point of the home VCR – that it allowed you to score through the TV guide, and watch what you wanted (out of what was actually broadcast, natch) when you wanted – only later was it a way to touch base with Hollywood's cinematic finest (and other efforts).

Seemingly everything about the VHS and the VCR is here – from the battle between the main two formats (certainly not the first two attempts at home video recording and sources of duplicated entertainment), to the problems Hollywood had with use of pre-recorded films being against all their copyright and free expression laws, to the video nasty and porn clamp-downs, and how VCRs survived in the society the other side of the Iron Curtain. Closer to home, Blockbuster took over all the mom-and-pop bricks-and-mortar rental outlets, not knowing what was coming down the digital pipeline.

This is a touch less light than some in this franchise, but it's certainly readable, and never once feels like academic writing. This is accessible, intelligent stuff – and certainly brought back many memories for me, both with home VCRs and with my engagement with what was already by then the dying industry of the local video store. The VHS left us with no end of cultural fall-out (Quentin Tarantino, those apps that scruff up digital files to look more analog and ropey, "You've Been Framed") – and reading this little book about it is a very suitable look back at it all indeed.

It felt a little disjointed in places (sometimes the author switched topics way too quickly), but overall this is a fun pop culture analysis of the humble VHS tape.
The book charts the beginning of the technology (yes, it does touch on the VHS vs Betamax format wars) and how it transformed into something greater (a symbol of pop culture, a way of socializing, a rebellious way of consuming 'forbidden' media, etc). It was fascinating to read about the history of piracy in countries that forbid (or severely censored) the technology, and as a horror fan it was cool to see the whole 'Video Nasties' battle mentioned in detail.

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this book.

"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things." Videotape is an focused exploration of the decade when VHS was ubiquitous, but that its universalism was fleeting.

Like other similar entertainment media (sheet music, cds, DVDS, etc..) it is the story of the shift from scheduled, public and communal to private and on-demand. Across ix chapters Godeanu-Kentworthy details the development of the VHS tape from initial ideas and key technological developments to the a wider look societal focus. Key themes explored are cold war cultural battles, corporate consolidation, legal change or interpretation and the way viewership and access has changed.

Recommended to readers of the Object Lessons series, pop culture or the technologies of popular entertainment.

A trip to the past carried by the author's pen and research! I so miss VHS (my brother and I used to build castles with their bulky plastic cases) and the thrill of renting and buying a physical movie. Thank you for the ARC :)

I'd been thinking the other day that I'd not read an Object Lesson in a while, and then three popped up on Netgalley, of which I passed on Taco (not a fan) and Cat (not an object) but went straight for the Gen X nostalgia option. And one of the things the book brings home is quite how generationally specific the format's moment was – though that's complicated by an ambivalence which sometimes treats the DVD as a skinny cousin, pretty much a videotape by another name, and elsewhere as its slayer, a step in the reassertion of corporate control after the anarchy of consumer choice and small entrepreneurship that the video boom brought. But that picture of the present as one in which "to watch the movie of your choice, you have to have a subscription to the particular streaming platform that owns it" owes more to F.A.C.T. than facts, and is all the more baffling when some of the strongest sections here derive from Godeanu-Kenworthy's upbringing in communist Romania, where video and particularly Western content was sort of illegal, but in practice ubiquitous. Is her apparent obliviousness to modern piracy, which doesn't even rely on a similar connection to informal neighbourhood networks, rhetorical sleight of hand, publisher caginess, or genuine lack of awareness? Whichever it is, it's a not insignificant problem. Similarly, while her summary of the broad lineaments of the video nasty panic is solid, likewise of the US entertainment industry's attempt to strangle video in its crib, and I suspect any individual, sourced nugget of trivia here is sound, I get nervous about trusting a broader, bolder claim – for instance, that there's no evidence for the commonly held belief that adult material hem hem was central to VHS' triumph over Betamax* – in a book which also asserts that "In the early 1980s, the only TV options in Britain were limited to three BBC TV channels and the movie theater".

*Though Betamax was not officially discontinued until 2002, apparently! Bonkers.