@heihachi_73 wrote:
The rest, about $2 each if that, and $7.45 postage due to being over 20mm thick; no-one wants to pay nearly $10 for an old video with the majority of the cost being Parcel Post. I think I've sold two VHS videos on here in three years, both being Peter Brock/Holden racing videos from the 90s. The Buffy/Angel triple packs I have listed cost upwards of $15 for postage because they weigh over half a kilo, in fact, even just sending two videos together can be over 500g, especially when a cardboard box weighs 100g or more by itself.
I dumped about 60 videos out the front of Savers last year, only got about 900 more to go. Unfortunately most of them are ex-rentals from a video store that closed down, and I would rather not hurt my selling reputation by putting them on here as they are probably all stuffed or well worn with fuzzy pictures and scratchy/static/buzzing sound as I've heard on a few (which oddly only happens in stereo; when I put the VCR in mono mode these old videos sound fine for the most part).
Rad (BMX movie) used to be a rare video back in the day, it was never officially released on DVD or anything else since. It really was a case of "keep circulating the tapes".
Did anyone have Betamax videos? I definitely remember my parents' Beta VCR in the late 80s/early 90s, and the fact that it was almost never used because the "big" videos wouldn't fit and had to go in the other one. 🙂
Our first VCR was a Betamax because at the time that was all you could get. Hiring movies, while expensive, was a real treat back then and once VHS came in, getting a Beta rental was getting more difficult. The shop would have aisle after aisle of VHS movies and one small rack of Beta. As my step father was one of those people who had to have the latest and greatest of everything, we ended up upgrading to VHS.
Our Beta VCR had a CORDED remote control that had FF, play and stop. If you needed to record something or rewind the tape, you had to do it from the unit. The cord on the remote wasn't that long, so it sat in the middle of the floor if we were watching something. That meant, you still had to get up to operate it. It was still a fight between us who was going to push the buttons. It was sooooo different to getting up and pushing the buttons on the TV! It was exciting for us kids!
The first VHS we got was the first one with a cordless IR remote control. The unit had a little flap door at the front where the remote would sit when it wasn't in use. That remote could do everything, including record and rewind. It even had frame by frame, slow play, x 2 play. It cost a small fortune at the time, around $800 I think, which back then, was a lot of money (average wage was around $90-110/wk). Still, my step father couldn't wait and had to have it as soon as it was on the market. If he was still alive now, he'd be one of those spending a week outside the Apple store when a new phone was about to be released.
In the big scheme of things, Betamax was a far higher quality than VHS, which is probably why VHS tapes were cheaper to buy. For many many years, TV cameramen all used Beta tapes in the cameras. It had nothing to do with them being smaller, everything to do with the superior quality.
I still have a VCR. It's attached to the TV, but it isn't plugged in and rarely gets used these days. The quality of the picture through the LCD TV's is atrocious. I still have quite a few video tapes, including some where I'd taped something off the TV. I don't have any off the above mentioned list. In fact, I hadn't actually heard of any off the list! These days I use a DVR if I want to record something off the TV.
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But it's just as much a marketing move as anything else, because that sort of thing appeals to the people who want something limited / exclusive (i.e. only the people who really like the music will buy a recording on an obsolete format, and for some that's a boastable acheivement). It got pretty outrageous after a while, with people finding more and more obscure or obsolete formats to release music on, including a pianola roll, and one on an old Atari game cartridge. 
