The popularity of VHS was intertwined with the rise of the video rental market,[9] when films were released on pre-recorded videotapes for home viewing.

[16] Kenjiro Takayanagi, a television broadcasting pioneer then working for JVC as its vice president, saw the need for his company to produce VTRs for the Japanese market at a more affordable price.

The U-matic format was successful in businesses and some broadcast television applications, such as electronic news-gathering, and was produced by all three companies until the late 1980s, but because of cost and limited recording time, very few of the machines were sold for home use.

[19] By the end of 1971, they created an internal diagram, "VHS Development Matrix", which established twelve objectives for JVC's new VTR:[20] In early 1972, the commercial video recording industry in Japan took a financial hit.

To prevent the MITI from adopting Betamax, JVC worked to convince other companies, in particular Matsushita (Japan's largest electronics manufacturer at the time, marketing its products under the National brand in most territories and the Panasonic brand in North America, and JVC's majority stockholder), to accept VHS, and thereby work against Sony and the MITI.

[25] Sony eventually created a Beta III speed of 0.524 ips, which allowed NTSC Betamax to break the two-hour limit, but by then VHS had already won the format battle.

The flip-up cover, which allows players and recorders to access the tape, has a latch on the right side, with a push-in toggle to release it (bottom view image).

[citation needed] The recording medium is a Mylar[36] magnetic tape, 12.7 mm (1⁄2 inch) wide, coated with metal oxide, and wound on two spools.

As VHS was designed to facilitate recording from various sources, including television broadcasts or other VCR units, content producers quickly found that home users were able to use the devices to copy videos from one tape to another.

"Level II" Macrovision uses a process called "colorstriping", which inverts the analog signal's colorburst period and causes off-color bands to appear in the picture.

[citation needed] Both intentional and false-positive detection of Macrovision protection has frustrated archivists who wish to copy now-fragile VHS tapes to a digital format for preservation.

The frequency modulation of the VHS luminance signal is limited to 3 megahertz, which makes higher resolutions technically impossible even with the highest-quality recording heads and tape materials, but an HQ branded deck includes luminance noise reduction, chroma noise reduction, white clip extension, and improved sharpness circuitry.

In 1987, JVC introduced a new format called Super VHS (often known as S-VHS) which extended the bandwidth to over 5 megahertz, yielding 420 analog horizontal (560 pixels left-to-right).

[26] Because of the limited user base, Super VHS was never picked up to any significant degree by manufacturers of pre-recorded tapes, although it was used extensively in the low-end professional market for filming and editing.

For the VHS SP mode, which already uses a lower tape speed than the compact cassette, this resulted in a mediocre frequency response[41] of roughly 100 Hz to 10 kHz for NTSC,[citation needed] frequency response for PAL VHS with its lower standard tape speed was somewhat worse of about 80 Hz to 8 kHz.

To avoid crosstalk and interference from the primary video carrier, VHS's implementation of AFM relied on a form of magnetic recording called depth multiplexing.

Likewise, some countries, most notably South Africa, provided alternate language audio tracks for TV programming through an FM radio simulcast.

Another issue that made VHS Hi-Fi imperfect for music is the inaccurate reproduction of levels (softer and louder) which are not re-created as the original source.

The other improved standard, called Digital-VHS (D-VHS), records digital high definition video onto a VHS form factor tape.

A smaller number still are able, additionally, to record subtitles transmitted with world standard teletext signals (on pre-digital services), simultaneously with the associated program.

[77] The Hill said that David Cronenberg's movie A History of Violence, sold on VHS in 2006, was "widely believed to be the last instance of a major motion picture to be released in that format".

[78][79] By December 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported on "the final truckload of VHS tapes" being shipped from a warehouse in Palm Harbor, Florida, citing Ryan J. Kugler's Distribution Video Audio Inc. as "the last major supplier".

[83] The last known company in the world to manufacture VHS equipment was Funai of Japan, who produced video cassette recorders under the Sanyo brand in North America.

The last major studio film to be released in the format in the United States and Canada, other than as part of special marketing promotions, was A History of Violence in 2006.

The horror film V/H/S/2 was released as a combo in North America that included a VHS tape in addition to a Blu-ray and a DVD copy on September 24, 2013.

Though occasionally showing compression artifacts and color banding that are common discrepancies in digital media, the durability and longevity of a VCD depends on the production quality of the disc, and its handling.

While the DVD was highly successful in the pre-recorded retail market, it failed to displace VHS for in home recording of video content (e.g. broadcast or cable television).

A number of factors hindered the commercial success of the DVD in this regard, including: High-capacity digital recording systems are also gaining in popularity with home users.

[102][103][104][105] In 2015, the Yale University Library collected nearly 3,000 horror and exploitation movies on VHS tapes, distributed from 1978 to 1985, calling them "the cultural id of an era.

[111][112] The VHS aesthetic is also a central component of the analog horror genre, which is largely known for imitating recordings of late 20th century TV broadcasts.