Jason Elk

When I grew up in the 80s, we often went to the video shop to rent videos. It was a pretty simple exercise. I ran in and grabbed as many Loony Tunes cartoons as I could and watched them over and over and over again. The shop was called Movie Time and they had VHS tapes right up front with a few of the (by then suffering) Betamax tapes in the back.

Some time in the mid-90s when internet first hit SA, I remember reading about Laserdiscs overseas. They were as big as vinyl records but promised better visual and sound quality than video cassette tapes because everything was recorded digitally onto disc. No more tape getting stuck in the machine! So we found the only Laserdisc stockist in Cape Town (a very enterprising German guy in Sea Point) and began a collection. The first movie I ever owned on Laserdisc was The Rock - pretty apt considering the disc itself must’ve weighed pretty close to a kilogram.

I was buzzing along happily when suddenly news of the DVD format started to surface. A smaller disc with greater storage capabilities. At the time, I really couldn’t see the movie studios forking out for yet another disc-based format and expecting customers to start buying all over again. But popularity of the small discs obviously grew and suddenly Pyramid Video in Sea Point was adding ‘DVDS’ to their neon lettering in the window. And has more time has passed, VHS has all but vanished from most of the video shops completely.

Now just as everyone has filled albums, bookshelves and even entire rooms with the VHS-killing DVDs, we’re presented with yet another format that will have video shops calling in their sign writers again. Blu-ray. And this time the physical size of the disc isn’t even changing. It’s the capacity of the disc that makes the difference, so that HD video and incredible sound can replace the (what used to be revolutionary) dismal old DVD quality. But even Blu-ray had to fight it out with HD-DVD for its place on the video shop shelf.

The rate as which video technology is changing is amazing (as an early adopter) and frightening (as a consumer without an unlimited budget). Blu-ray better sell a boatload of players and recorders to get everyone to convert their entire library all over again, and before the world realises that hard copy formats are still too limited - MP4 downloads into your PVR are where it’s at. For now.

I just don’t know what our corner video shops are going to ask their sign writers to come up with when that day does eventually roll around.

Tagged as video + Categorized as Everything