Page 156 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

The DVD: Home V ew ng of Mov es Comes of Age | 1

a hoMe Viewing tiMeline
1922—The Pathé Baby, the first home movie projector, appears.
1923—Kodascope 16-mm projector and Cine-Kodak 16-mm motion picture camera in-
troduced.
1925—Kodascope Libraries, the first of a number of similar enterprises, began offering
16-mm films for rental.
1930—First regular television transmissions, by the BBC.
1933—The first 16-mm projector with sound, the RCA Victor Photophone Junior Portable,
comes on the market.
1946—Home sales of television sets begin to show commercial possibilities of the
medium.
1948—First cable television system introduced.
1949—William Boyd, who had bought the rights to his “Hopalong Cassidy” movies, edits
them and offers them to television stations.
1953—Admiral introduces the color television set.
1956—AMPEX introduces first videotape recorder.
1958—Optical video disc invented.
1961—Saturday Night at the Movies debuts on NBC.
1972—Philips introduces the first home videocassette recorder.
MCA/Philips LaserDisc demonstrated.
1975—Sony Betamax marketed.
1977—JVC introduces the first VHS VCR with two-hour tapes.
1996—First DVD player sold (in Japan).

set designers and directors have found themselves concentrating more on the
details in their shots, sometimes to the detriment of the whole, as happened in
Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander, where even the buttons on the
costumes were faithful reproductions of early nineteenth-century buttons, but
where more significant historical gaffes went undetected.

ConCLusion

Though the DVD may not have a long life as a vehicle for movies or television
(or even for games), it has helped change viewer relations to films—and has fi-
nally convinced studio executives that home viewing of movies is not something
to be fought, but encouraged, and that non-advertiser-driven television can be
lucrative. Collectors of videotapes were always a little shy about their hobby,
knowing that the versions of the movies that they cherished were not of high
quality, due to limitations in the technology and the editing (including pan-and-
scan) that generally accompanied them. The DVD has changed that. With the
DVD has come not just improvement in quality, but the extras have sparked a
new interest in the history of movies as well as in genres that have been long
considered almost dead. DVD collectors have become students of movies and