Japan’s Funai Electronics announced they will stop building VCRs this month. They have trouble finding the parts to build the machines:
“We are the last manufacturer… in all of the world,” the company said in a statement, which cited sales of just 750,000 in 2015. That’s down by millions from the video cassette player’s heyday.
Funai began production in 1983 and sold 15 million machines during their heyday:
They represented the beginnings of the home entertainment revolution. For the first time consumers could watch movies at home, whenever they wanted to. They also could tape and watch television shows, freeing them from the schedule of the networks and allowing them to fast-forward through commercials.Known as VHS tapes, for “video home system,” the tapes allowed viewers to break with the constraints of media gate keepers, laying the groundwork for today’s streaming media.
But since the late 1990s, DVDs and Blu-Ray have made tapes obsolete.
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