The 80's and 90's gave the world video rental and pre-recorded titles, but what if I were to tell you the concept of video rental and pre-recorded titles pre-dates VHS and even Betamax? No joke!
Set your *Insert pop culture time machine here (Wayback, Tardis, Delorean, etc)* to the year 1972. This year we see M*A*S*H (a book that became a movie and later a show) make its debut on television, German rockers Scorpions releasing their debut album Lonesome Crow, Atari Inc busy at work designing and test marketing Pong, and this particular year in June, we see the 2nd video cassette format (the first was the Sony U-Matic 1 3/4 inch tape player released the previous September in 1971) hit the market: The Avco Cartrivision
The tapes were these large 8-track like video cassettes (with the difference being these 8-tracks you could fast forward, rewind, or record over) you'd put into a VCR built into a television set. As I mentioned, this was the first format to offer pre-recorded titles, most of which consisted of nature documentaries, the most recent sporting events of the time (like one of the first Super Bowls came out for it), kid's shows, already old films with Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne, and even adult films. So why didn't this catch on? Lots of reasons:
Its price tag - The Cartrivision ran for $1,600 with video 8-tracks running $7 a pop. As you can imagine, nobody was willing to shell out that much for a colour tv with a fancy add-on nobody knew how to use
The Picture Quality - While U-Matic didn't have any official pre-recorded titles it did have slightly better picture quality by 1971 home video standards. Cartrivision used a skip field method cutting 2 frame rates so they could squeeze 2 hours on to a Video 8-track. This made for some super choppy picture quality
The tapes themselves - The biggest problem with the tapes was the reels were stacked on top of each other running from one end of the tape to the other. This created jamming and crumpling issues resulting shaky picture and audio drop outs. Not to mention most of the tapes were damaged due to poor storage
The fact that Cartridge Television Inc didn't bother making separate stand alone VCRs (Save for some later homemade models designed by hobbyist of the format)
Overall, at the end of the day, the device was ahead of its time, but the execution was done poorly. As for the video rental, well, Cartrivision Video Rental shops were not readily available in 1972, so to rent Cartrivision tapes, you'd order them from a catalogue and they would send you a red 8-track you could watch once (without fast forward or rewinding it) before sending it back to the company whom would put the tape in a special rewinder and start the process over with the next customer.
Having lost thousands in the project (that and word of the unreleased RCA MagTape player posing a potential threat), Avco pulled the plug on Cartrivision in July of 1973. Most of its parts unsold stock and tapes were auctioned off. While Cartrivision was doomed to failure, it paved the way for home video as we would come to know it years later. So had it not been for Cartrivision, none of y'all would have been going to Blockbuster in the 90's or watching Disney films repeat ad naseum (#JustSayin). Links in the next comment. Sorry I didn't post photos but doing that on mobile is next to an absolute nightmare (for me anyway)
