The home movie or slideshow was once a big part of American social life. After a vacation or wedding, the family and friends would gather ‘round for the viewing… often bored to tears, but that was part of the experience. Nowadays, video recording has become so common that it has all but lost its “specialness”. There’s hardly a reason to invite people over to look at slides from your Bahamas trip – just post your stuff on Facebook or Flickr and be done with it. The communal aspect of the movie is kinda faded.
In the 1950s, the 16mm camera was fairly common, but it was still pretty expensive for the average family to afford (about $500 in today’s currency). It wasn’t until the Super8 hit the market that it got cheap, and therefore widespread. In the 1980’s, you had the fairly expensive and clunky cassette video recorders, and, finally, in the last decade, digital video recorders became historically cheap, and a standard feature on mobile phones.
So, what drives the advancement of home movie technology? A lot of people claim it’s pornography. However, there are two sides on this issue.
You can’t deny home movie projectors were widely used for stag movies – short pornographic “loops” that were quite popular in Europe as well as the States. However, the catalyst for its development may have been due to the Super8’s cheap mass production rather than porn revenue.
It’s a commonly held belief that Betamax was killed by a US pornographers’ unanymous decision to adopt the VHS over the Betamax; however, the story behind the VHS ascension is a lot more complex than that. Suffice it to say that there were plenty of Betamax porn movies produced, easily disproving this myth.
One thing that would seem irrefutable is the huge impact of pornography on the innovations in pay-cable. However, according to
Forbes, the impact of pornography on the media business as a whole is marginal at best. According to Forbes.com, adult video income is only approximately $1 billion. The industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion ), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion).
That being said, the numbers surrounding the porn industry are very unclear. I’ve read several sources that claim the porn industry made $12 billion just on DVD sales in 2007, and overall sales figures are something like $100 billion! Indeed, according to
60 Minutes, DirectTV alone made $500 million just from its adult channels, and hotel chains report that 70 percent of their in-room profit is from the porn channels. This would seem to fly in the face of the
Forbes study.
So, the truth about how much the porn industry rakes in seems to be dependent on who you ask.
Subsequently, the catalyst that has driven the advancement of the home movie is still up for debate. What will be interesting to see is where the home movie technology is taken in the next ten years. My guess is that it can’t get much cheaper or convenient. The improvements will be in the form of quality and ability to manipulate. In other words, it may soon be that you can make a Hollywood quality film in your backyard, complete with high quality sound and CGI effects.
We’ve certainly come a long way from those boring vacation slideshows. I guess that’s a good thing, right?
While you ponder that, here's a few home movie equipment ads from yesteryear. Cheers!
