[4] After purchasing a Sony Betamax VCR unit in 1975,[1] Lowe became infatuated the brand-new home videotape format and placed an advertisement in Movie Collector's World inquiring about exchanging tapes of programs recorded off-air.

[8] Besides the classified pages of the newsletter, Lowe also wrote in editorials discussing methods and aspects in off-air television recording and new innovations and devices in the burgeoning field of home videotape.

[15] The Videophile's Newsletter reached several thousand subscribers in mid-1978, helped along by features and namedrops in mainstream publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Money, and Playboy.

[16] This crowdfunding campaign was successful, and by late 1978 Lowe raised enough capital to lease an office for a full-time newsroom and to turn the newsletter into a glossy, professionally typeset magazine with studio-photographed covers.

[17] If each of us will invest a small portion (no more than 2 percent) of our collections in certain examples of mundane, trashy and mostly worthless programming we may well find that in the distant future we alone will have been responsible for the preservation of some items which, in retrospect, may not seem to be as lacking in merit as we originally thought.

[19] The magazine competed for the videophile (videotape hobbyist) market against publications such as Film Collector's World, Videoplay, Video Buyer's Guide, and Channels of Communication.

"[21] Journalist Guy MacMillin in 1980 described the newsletter as providing minimal advertising aside from the classifieds and the editorial sections as unafraid to "step on important industry toes in its articles, features, and product reports.

"[22] Lowe reported in 1981 that the magazine did not generate considerable profit for his publishing house but broke even and expressed hope that he could raise more money by trading stock in the company in exchange for capital.