Did people commonly watched movies many times a day when vhs was introduced?
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Video
LouvrePigeon — 8 months ago(July 31, 2025 10:17 PM)
I saw an episode on Friends where Ross immeidately calls to rewind a video tape of Diehard 2 and rewatch the whole movie again along to Joey and Chandler and they agree because the love the movie just that much. Ob Seinfeld from what I seen so far its common for Jerry to rent the same movie over and over from the local video store and ine episode even involves Kramer breaking a tape on the day Seinfeld has to return it because he was watching it too many times.
So I'm wondering was it normal for people to watch a movie over and over when they purchased a video cassette copy of a movie whe the first came back near the end of the 1970s? Did people actually watch movies they rented multiple times a day? Was finally watching a movie at home just that huge of a deal that people used a tape they had access to multiple times even if the owned the copy? I'm really wondering I'd we take it for granted having home media storage from seeing that Friend episode and multiple Seinfeld episodes. -
geewizzz — 8 months ago(August 01, 2025 07:43 AM)
So I'm wondering was it normal for people to watch a movie over and over when they purchased a video cassette copy of a movie whe the first came back near the end of the 1970s?
When movies were first available on VHS, it would cost around $70 to buy each.
Not a lot available at first. Definitely not in the 1970s.
What they had was cable TV. Local cable stations that played a handful of movies per month
often repeating the same movie two or three times a day.
Shorts, cartoons and music videos filling the time between movies.
HBO and Showtime also reaching wider audiences by 1979/1980
Both channels offering more variety but sometimes repeating the same movie a couple times a day.
Video stores started around 1980 and became more popular around 1983 and onward.
I'd say most didn't watch the same movie over and over unless there were one or two that they really really really liked.
They might watch parts of them when they were on cable after seeing the whole movie once.
Though some who only watched parts of a movie without seeing all of it.
Some may have re-rented their favorite movies from video stores, but that wasn't that common for most.
Some had more than one video recorder and would buy a blank video tape and record a movie they had rented so they could re-watch it as much as they wanted until the companies started putting copy protection on the tapes.
There were ways around that though.
You could also record them when they aired on cable TV.
It was probably more common for younger age groups to re-watch their favorite movies.
Or watch them over in segments.
When movies first became available on video in the mid 70s, it was mostly porn movies, since a lot of people didn't feel comfortable going to adult theaters.
But it quickly grew into a mainstream market.
I would watch a movie and maybe watch certain ones again with friends or family members.
Sometimes it was the other way around, when you wanted to watch a movie alone or without distractions.
That was more common at first, when there wasn't as many you could access.
The more that became available, the less you tend to watch over and over.
What people do more now is collect movies and don't have time or don't take the time to watch many of them.
They either want them to show off to others how many they have, or they want them in their possession in case they aren't easily available down the road.
Are you okay? -
Zanderson — 8 months ago(August 02, 2025 05:14 PM)
When I rented a movie back in the day I would often watch it more than once, sometimes with different groups of people. Before there was streaming video and it cost 5 dollars to rent a movie for a couple nights you would get the most out of it.
