Rumors of VHS’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Oh, planned obsolescence, you are such an insistent mistress.

It seems like the end of the year news hole combined with the imminent digital TV transition (which does not necessarily mean the end of analog TV…) has sparked additional interest in the press ringing the funeral bells for that most ubiquitous yet unloved video medium, the VHS videocassette. The renewed attentiveness was triggered by a recent LA Times article about the last remaining supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes to retail stores. The discount supplier tells Times reporter Geoff Boucher,

Photo credit: the waving cat / flickr

“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.”

Boucher notes that the last major Hollywood release on VHS was 2006′s “The History of Violence.” However, that does not mean it’s the last VHS release, since there are certainly direct-to-video, corporate, promotional and independent releases still being churned out on videocassettes. And that’s just US market. What about VHS in less developed nations especially India and Latin America, where the push to new formats goes slower because there’s that much less disposible income?

I don’t have a beef with Boucher’s article so much as the second-order press and blogosphere reaction that seizes upon the “VHS is dead” meme rather than the more specific point that the production and distribution of pre-recorded VHS movies are ending. My problem is two-fold. First, I can’t help but think the minor panic-inducing tone of the overall reportage is timed and focused in order to help drive DVD and Blu-Ray sales, especially amongst the digital disc holdouts who up to now have been satisfied with their VHS collection.

Second, it’s overly simplistic to say that VHS is dead just because prerecorded tapes will become more scarce in 2009. One of the most disruptive aspects of home videocassette technology is the fact that it’s recordable; with a VHS VCR you don’t have to simply rely on a steady stream of commercially prerecorded content. I’m willing to bet that millions of VHS VCRs are still in service across the US doing just that — recording someone’s favorite movie on TV or timeshifting a favorite TV program.

Sure, millions of people have shifted to using DVD recorders or DVRs for that purpose, or are time-shifting by watching things online. But that population is still a small percentage of the whole, characterized by having the income necessary to afford these more expensive technologies, combined with the knowledge, interest and will to use them. VHS is dead for a certain class of people, but not the whole country.

Nevertheless, it is true, as one TV report said, that “VHS’ days appear numbered. ” But then, that’s been true pretty much since the first year of DVD, when that technology went on to set records for fast large-scale adoption. Even then the writing was on the wall, just as it is with nearly every single consumer electronics technology ever introduced. Do not doubt that from the time when the first VHS recorder rolled off the assembly line that the electronics giants didn’t have dozens of designs for its successor on the drawing board. It just took until 1997 for DVD to strike the right combination of size, convenience, image quality and price.

Obsolescence is not a natural process, but one planned right into the consumer economy. Now, I’m not arguing against innovations and the succession of technologies with better, more attractive qualities and greater utility. I certainly barely watch VHS tapes myself, and mostly rely on my DVR and on DVDs. So VHS is not a vibrant everyday technology in my household. Yet, that does not mean VHS is useless or dead.

Of course this is the sunset for VHS, but I question the rush to scare people into buying new technologies. Certainly, my recommendation to anyone who has VHS tapes that have irreplaceable stuff on them to consider copying them to DVD, whether it’s a home video or an out-of-print movie (you don’t even need your own DVD recorder — most chain drug stores in the US will do it for you). But that’s as much because of the inevitable slow degradation of magnetic media as it is the eventual death of VHS. I’d make the same recommendation if your precious memories are on DVD — though copying a rare commercially recorded disc will prove more difficult due to digital rights management.

Some justification for declaring VHS’ death rests upon the analog TV transition happening in February. And while it is true that your old VHS workhorse will not be able to record the new digital signals directly, it’s not counted out. The first reason why is that if you still have an analog TV and are using a cable converter box or one of the digital converter boxes for over-the-air broadcasts, then your VCR should still be able to record their digital output. Furthermore, even new digital TVs still have analog inputs for VCRs, DVD players, game consoles and the like, and will continue to have them for a long time. So getting a new flat-panel TV doesn’t mean you can’t still watch your VHS tapes.

Let’s remember that vinyl records and cassettes were declared dead in the early 90s when CDs finally became predominant. And yet, here we are in 2009 and we’re reading about the minor resurgence of vinyl, and you can still buy new books on tape. Sure, you’re not going to find the newest rock albums on new cassette, and new vinyl LPs are still made in tiny numbers compared to CDs. Yet that does not qualify a format as “dead.”

It’s arguable that the LP resurgence is driven both by nostalgia and a hardcore minority that has contended that vinyl sounds better and therefore stuck with the format through the CD era. Cassettes also have some nostalgic allure for many, especially when it comes to memories of mix tapes, while having a much tinier fanbase who cling to the format for its sheer fidelity. I think it’s too early to tell if there will be gathering nostalgia for the lowly VHS videotape in the same way. I’m not sure people have the same emotional attachments to recordings of TV shows and movies that they have for music… but that could just be me.

If you’re wanting to rent or buy the newest Hollywood movie releases then you’re going to need a DVD player — but then, just about anyone with that desire in the US already knows that and has made the appropriate decision. If you’ve still got a VHS VCR and are happily using it there’s no need to panic. Now might not be a bad time to pick up a spare VCR if you can afford it, nor is it a bad time to consider making DVD backups of anything that’s really valuable to you.

But make no mistake, there’s no indication that you won’t be able to buy a new VCR or blank VHS taps for quite some time to come. Unlike Polaroid film or other single-manufacturer technologies, VHS was licensed far and wide. As long as there’s a buck to be made making and selling recorders and tapes, they’ll be out there.

Like cassettes and vinyl records, VHS tapes and VCRs will continue to live alongside the technologies that are supposed to replace them. Going out of favor does not mean obsolete.

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Reboot the FCC? Better, Democratize the FCC

A week ago Prof. Larry Lessig penned a provocative little column for Newsweek that apparently was supposed to be titled “Blow Up the FCC,” but was published as “Reboot the FCC.” In essence, Lessig argues for the FCC to be done away with, replaced by an “Innovation Environment Protection Agency,” focused on curtailing monopoly power in telecommunications and staffed by professions without any industry ties.

Indeed, Lessig provoked a response across the media reform blogosphere and elsewhere. I’m a little late to the game in adding my comments (a whole week is like a decade for a blog!), but I’ve wanted to think about it for a while before firing off.

As John and I discussed on last night’s radioshow, I think replacing the FCC is problematic, primarily because I don’t trust another government agency to necessary do a better job. Why would I think an iEPA would be any better than the current EPA, which has been hamstrung under the Bush administration in a far more damaging way than the Bush FCC?

The ban on industry ties is the most interesting amongst Lessig’s proposals, though one which would also be difficult to achieve in practical terms. Nevertheless, it’s valuable for Lessig to jump-start the debate like this, regardless of the details.

What has been left out of the debate is the very fundamental notion of democracy. The left-progressive reaction to Lessig’s salvo has been along the lines of, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” or more reactionarily fearful of losing the few public interest regulations that still have teeth. The libertarian reaction has been mostly “Atta boy, but you don’t go far enough!” Unfortunately it gets boiled down to regulation vs. deregulation or government vs. no government.

What it really should be is public accountability vs. industry solidarity. For all of its flaws the FCC is still a nominally democratic agency, with five commissioners who actually vote on proceedings, who represent the two major parties. While the majority represent the party in the executive, there is still a reasonably powerful minority that can’t be steamrolled constantly, even in the unlikely event that the majority commissioners march in utter lockstep.

The uptick in citizen activism on media and communication issues has only forced the FCC to become more responsive, though not nearly as much as we’d like. Compared to the USDA or DHS the FCC seems absolutely transparent and accountable. Yet I agree that the FCC is still a captured regulator where commissioners and high level staff have a disproportionate incentive to feather their beds for a soft landing in the private sector after their public service tour.

There’s a strong side of me that would love nothing more but to see the FCC go away, except that I don’t trust the so-called “free market” to result in anything better for the public. We’re not starting at ground zero, and the current inequities in communication–especially the oligopolistic control of broadcast and telecomm–would only be exacerbated by an FCC-less US. While I do like the idea of a “reboot” with a new agency, I’m not sure this kind of creative destruction would be sufficiently creative nor destructive. In what way is the Department of Homeland Security that different from the separated pre-2001 TSA and FEMA?

Instead, I think the focus needs to be the increased democratization of regulatory bodies, making changes that require greater public responsiveness and accountability. What if FCC commissioners were elected? Sure, it flies in the face of our current executive practices, but it also means we could end up with an FCC that is far more representative of the public interest than either the president or congress. Less radically, what if public comment requirements were strengthened and the equal of anti-lobbying rules enacted, along the lines of Lessig’s suggestions for an iEPA? Combined with restricting the industry ties of FCC staff I think you’d see a lot of changes at the Commission.

Of course we can’t expect the FCC to become that much better than any other federal agency, not to mention the Congress and the president. There’s an overall lack of accountability and democracy in the US government in general. It’s unreasonable to expect the FCC or iEPA to be any more accountable than the executive or your state’s senators. Without wider reform or reconstruction of the nation’s politics we are not going to see a substantially better FCC. Following the libertarian argument, doing away with the FCC entirely is only useful if we do away with government entirely, which, to me, is only useful if we also dismantle corporate power in the process, truly leveling the playing field. That’s the plan that would get my vote if it were truly on the table.

Short of that, reforming the FCC we have is our best bet. With our current corporatized government a better, more responsive and accoutable FCC is better than no FCC at all.

Cheapskate Audiophile

As a geek videophile audiophile there’s the tendency for that interest to be conflict with my critical side that questions our modern consumerist capitalist economy. I believe that balance can be found, as long as one accepts that it’s nearly impossible to be entirely non-comsumerist without checking out of modern technological society altogether. Yet, it is possible to temper the consumerist side while still having enthusiasm for good audio and video and the aesthetics of sound and vision.

In particular, I think I’ve always been an audiophile. I’ve been obsessed with sound and music since I was a child, and I’ve always been interested in finding better, more pleasing, more realistic sound reproduction. While in high school in the mid-80s I bought my first component cassette deck, amplifier, CD player and turntable. All of this gear was decidedly “mid-fi” by audiophile standards, but still whet my appetite for sound that was significantly better than the boomboxes and discount-store compact stereos used by most of my peers.

While I’ve been willing to spend some amount of disposable income on audio gear, I’ve also been hestitant to lay down the kind of cash required to buy in to what is considered the “high-end” of audio gear. This is the world of $1000 CD players, $5000 turntables and $10,000 speakers. Certainly, the kind of craftsmanship and design excellence that goes into many of these products has real value. At the same time I think much of it is the audio equivalent of Ferraris and Lamborghinis — semi-impractical exotica meant to give the affluent something to spend their money on, while giving the less-affluent something to aspire to.

My experience in slogging around in the low-end of the high-end has proven to me that good sound does not have to be an exotic rare commodity only for the rich and golden-eared. In fact, very pleasing and accurate sound can be had for as the same or less money than it costs to buy a home-theater in a box system at Wal-Mart or Best Buy.

There are multiple paths to being a cheapskate audiophile, many of them DIY. The more industrious or crafty amongst us build some of their own gear, either from kits or from scratch. Others perform minor modifications on mass-market gear that results in sonic gains.

Possessing neither the skill nor patience to take these routes I instead keep my eyes and ears open for the bargains — gear that achieves unusually good results at an unusually low price-point. The ‘net is a real boon for all of us cheapskate audiophiles by giving us easy access to this sort of info that otherwise would come by word-of-mouth, technical books or low-circulation specialty magazines and newsletters.

To demonstrate I’ll show off my current cheapskate system which I use in my home office for music listening and audio production. The core cheapskate item in the system is the Sonic Impact T-Amp, which I’ve written about before. It’s a cheap, plastic $25 stereo amplifier based on a new digital amplifier design that rocked the audio world three years ago by producing sound more like an amp some 20x its price. The T-Amp is rated to produce 15 watts of power, and I think that’s probably stretching it. More likely, it delivers around 8 watts into most speakers. But they are still an incredibly clean, transparent 8 watts.
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On this week’s radioshow: The Falsies

There is pollution in the radio environment, and there are polluters. For the last five years the Center for Media Democracy has bestowed a special award on those who pile it high and deep — the Falsies. On tomorrow night’s radioshow][/caption] I’ll be talking with Senior Researcher, Diane Farsetta, who will tell us more about this years lose…. er, winners, including the first ever recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Falsie.

Tune in live at 9 PM CST to WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago or online at wnur.org (live 128kbps stream). The show will be available at the radioshow page this weekend.

mediageek radioshow for 11 December 2008: Looking Behind the Curtain at the Tribune Bankruptcy

Mitchell Szczepanczyk from Chicago Media Action joins to discuss the Dec. 8 filing for bankruptcy by the Tribune Company. Mitchell has been watching Tribune for many years now, since the company is a major media player both in the Chicago area and nationally. So he has some longitudinal perspective often lacking in press reports.

Download/Podcast:

mediageek 11 December 2008 broadcast quality mp3

Listen Now:

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On Tonight’s Radioshow: Breaking Down the Tribune Bankruptcy

Over at Chicago Media Action Mitchell Szczepanczyk has written a concise “Chicago Citizen Activist’s Guide to the Tribune Bankruptcy” that makes simple work of untangling the how and why the Tribune company is in the financial dumps:

The Tribune debt didn’t just happen. It happened because Zell used the debt to buy the company.

Why did Zell buy the company? Because a Tribune shareholder revolt in the summer of 2006 demanded a change of ownership, and the following spring they got it.

Why did Tribune shareholders revolt? Because the Tribune thought that by 2006 they would be rolling in cash for having a bunch of TV-newspaper duopolies. They banked their future on it. And for good reason: The Tribune already owned four such duopolies across America, and what, you were expecting media concentration to stop or something? Are you some kind of anti-market communist freak?

Mitchell will be my guest on the radioshow tonight (9 PM WNUR 89.3 FM, Evanston-Chicago, IL) to talk more in depth about the greed, incompetence, arrogance and myopia that led to so many job losses, eroded journalism and who-knows-what-more.

I’m working on my own piece triggered by the Tribune bankruptcy, but more broadly aimed at the rotten outcome of the post-1996 consolidation era. Some observers, free-marketeers and big media apologists are now claiming that such disasters as Clear Channel going private equity and all these bankruptcies are evidence that we don’t need ownership regs, because clearly the market is acting to correct the excesses of consolidation: See, now these big consolidated behemoths will be broken back down into littler pieces.

But what they fail to account for is the real human toll — the lost jobs, the lost public service, the diminished local content, news and information.

Don’t Be Spooked by Threats of Obsolesence

One of the unfortunate effects of our capitalist economy is the constant drive for new and better. Well, really it’s mostly new and novel, with better being a secondary consideration. That means obsolescence is something that constantly looms over industrial products, especially tech products. But obsolete does not equate with useless or worthless–not remotely.

With the rising popularity of digitally downloaded music, whether through file sharing or an online store, the imminent death of the physical compact disc continues to be predicted. The cries have become louder in the last few weeks as Atlantic Records announced that its digital download sales (which includes ringtones) surpassed its sales of physical CDs.

I’ll admit that these days I probably listen to more MP3s than CDs, especially on the go. Yet, I still have a collection of over 1000 CDs, most of which I have not ripped to MP3–my MP3 collection is comprised mostly of purchased music and stuff I’ve traded with friends. I do still listen to CDs, especially when I want to listen critically. I realize that absolute fidelity is only one factor in how we choose to listen to music, it’s still important to me and many other people. While MP3s and other compressed files can sound quite good, they are no match for the uncompressed source.

That’s why I’m not surprised to read a Wired Gadget Lab post directing me to this story from the UK’s Telegraph reporting that the sales of portable CD players there are up 50 percent over last year. Amongst the reasons they cite are price ( I’ve seen units here sell for $15 or less) and the fact that many people find using a computer to download to an MP3 player to be difficult.

One very obvious reason I want to add to the list is that maybe a whole lot of people aren’t interested in giving up their CDs in the first place. If you aren’t interested in dealing with the iTunes music store (especially if you don’t want to pay the iPod price premium) or any other online music store, and you don’t relish the task of having to rip and compress your CDs yourself I can see how the supposed convenience offered by MP3 players and digital files can look pretty darn inconvenient.

Folks over 30 can probably remember when they got their first CD player, moving over from listening primarily to vinyl LPs or cassettes. I knew a lot of people who all but dumped their analog music collections for CDs in the early 90s, lured in by the promises of better sound quality and convenience. By and large those promises were fulfilled, compared to the lo- to mid-fi sound experiences most people were accustomed to getting from inexpensive cassette and record players. But it was also a pretty big cash outlay for a lot of people, many of whom replaced their music collections with the same titles on CD as the popular press sounded the funeral march for the soon-to-be-obsolete vinyl LP.

Now twenty-six years after the introduction of the CD we have none other than the New York Times writing about the resurgent interest in vinyl records, sales of which are up 36% this year. Weren’t these fragile, scratchable, pop-and-click-filled analog dinosaurs supposed to be a curious historical artifact by now?

Myself, I never abandoned my record collection. When I bought my first CD player in 1987 I also bought my first decent turntable. From 1988 through the mid-90s I really cleaned up buying used vinyl for a song as other music lovers dumped their obsolete analog archives. I still buy both used and new vinyl, though since the big purge of the early-90s the good stuff isn’t quite as cheap anymore.

I’m sure a fair majority of the folks who dumped their vinyl for CDs have never looked back. But I’ve talked to and read about plenty more people who are buying new turntables to play their last remaining albums that never turned up on CD, or who are even going out and rebuying LPs they got rid of because their CDs just don’t cut it.

So keep this in mind when you hear bloggers and the press declaring the end of the CD and all physical media. It makes complete sense to me that sales of portable CD players are up because I can believe there are plenty of people who just want something will play all the music they’ve acquired without all the hassle of ripping and storing MP3s. Why “upgrade” to MP3s and iPods if CDs still work just fine and you’ve already got an investment in music on CD?

Of course, I do think the trend towards digital files and mass storage is real and underway — I do have a couple hundred gigs of MP3s on a server at home. But these technologies tend to live side-by-side for far longer than the technorati recognize. The cassette didn’t kill the LP, the DVD still hasn’t killed VHS, and the iPod won’t kill the CD. Even formats often joked about as comparative failures lived almost as long as the CD has–from laserdiscs (in production 1978-1999) to 8-tracks (1964 – 1988)–and still have their fans using them everyday.

The newest and shiniest technology can be very seductive, but utility is what wins the day. For a lot of formats there eventually does come a day when finding a working player becomes harder and harder. But for something as ubiquitous as the LP, cassette or CD that moment is a long way away.

The folks snapping up CD players this holiday season aren’t technophobes or luddites, they’re just reasonable folks who maybe don’t want to foolishly abandon the shiny little discs they spent good money for.

The PBS You Have Vs. the PBS You Wish You Had

On the radioshow two weeks ago I talked with my pal and public broadcasting alumnus Bill Poorman about some of his issues with that enterprise. Our actual conversation ran over an hour, so I had to leave out some of Bill’s comments about public TV, which were more critical than radio. But his comments rang through my head again when I read this commentary in Sunday’s NY Times, Is PBS Still Necessary?.

Bill made a lot of the same criticisms to me, noting that much of what PBS used to be known for–documentaries, nature programs, etc.–is now done in larger quantities, and often as well, by cable.

My own viewing habits reflect that reality. While I listen to quite a bit of public radio–it’s my primary daily news source–I watch relatively little public TV. I do tune in occasionally for the harder hitting documentary programs like Frontline and the indie-film oriented POV. But overall there’s little that interests me, and much that seems pretty musty and geriatric.

But that’s not an argument against the need for robust public television, so much as a criticism of the public television that currently exists in the US. Television is definitely more expensive to produce than radio, but I can’t help but think that public TV could be invigorated by taking a more grassroots, DIY approach, spending less per program but taking more risks. Current is one commercial approach, though its content is all short-form and unscheduled. Public TV could take the road of providing funding and a venue for longer-form programs and series that are truly more in touch with the public and not strictly commercial.

Why can’t PBS be the television home of one of the most innovative public radio programs of the last decade, This American Life, rather than Showtime?

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Of course, there are good, structural and political economic answers to that question. But again, that doesn’t mean we should give up on public TV, but I do think it needs a serious refresh.

free103point9 Says There’s No News in the Times about Brooklyn Microradio

Just noticed free103point9′s Tom Roe’s comments about the Times Brooklyn pirate radio article I blogged about yesterday. He calls it “under-reported,” by which I think he means “not sufficiently reported” by the freelancer who wrote the piece, not “under-reported” to mean “a story which deserves more coverage like this.”

Roe goes on to comment that the reporter,

fails to mention several prominent hip hop and hipster stations, and fails to address the “why” at all. Mindlin’s main news flash: WFUV’s web site has received 294 complaints about interference from pirates since August, though they could all be from one person as he doesn’t question this number at all.

Roe’s comments don’t really change my opinion on the matter. If it is indeed true that some of the new stations are creating real interference and/or broadcasting on the same frequencies as existing licensed or unlicensed stations, then they should cut it out and/or change frequencies. However, I share Roe’s skepticism about the story and its relative lack of substance or other strong evidence of interference.

FCC Ready to Rumble on Tuesday

The FCC’s having a big meeting this Tuesday, Dec. 18. The biggest item on the agenda is Chairman Martin’s attempt to rush through the near-total dissolution of the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban. It’s a plan he only revealed to the public and his fellow commissioners last month. As a result the public interest community, many Congresscritters and the FCC’s Democrats are pretty riled up.

John Anderson and I talked about the upcoming FCC meeting and Martin’s sneaky tactics on this week’s radio show, now available for download.

For more insight on the cross-ownership issue, see Matthew Lasar’s recent post on the subject. For a more inside-the-Beltway analysis of this issue and other items on the Feb. 18 agenda, check out two recent posts at the Broadcast Law blog:

• FCC Meeting Agenda for December 18 – Potentially One of the Most Important in Recent Memory – Multiple Ownership, Localism, Minority Ownership, Product Placement and Cable TV National Ownership Caps
• Moving Forward Back to 1980 – The FCC Set to Conclude that Specific Public Interest Obigations are Required for Broadcasters