Is It Worth Collecting VHS And Betamax Tapes?

When I was still a child. One of the highlights of my week was when I go to the VHS and Betamax shops to rent movie tapes. I even collected a few of them. But times change, and soon other forms of video storage media dominated the market.

Am I being nostalgic about an outdated technology that is rarely used these days? In a way, I am. These two video storage medias were the first technologies which brought me immense delight during my youth. But I’m not alone, I’m sure there would be others who would agree.

But as much as I wanted to be nostalgic, the more important issue about VHS and Betamax tapes is this: “Do they still have value?” Of which the answer is a resounding: “Yes, they still have value more than you think they have.”

These are strictly for the young people and younger who grew up with CDs and DVDs and have not seen a VHS or a Betamax Tape. It is said that the technology for these two video storage medias died in 2008 when the last manufacturer stopped producing them.

They are both video storage technologies which use magnetic tapes to store video and audio. Physically, they look like black rectangular plastic objects with clear plastic windows for you to view the rolled magnetic tape.

The Betamax is 6.2 x 3.75 x 1inches and the VHS is 7.3 x 4 x 1 inches. They also usually come enclosed in a thick paper or plastic cover. These covers are usually designed with the particular movie’s promo materials.

Before we proceed, let’s look at how physical video storage media has progressed through the years:

These were the first physical movie storage media. The contents of these physical video storage medias were black and white films with no audio. I’m sure that many people have seen at least one of these kinds of films.

Though many of these kinds of physical movie storage medias have been lost, those that survived have become very valuable not only historically, but commercially as well. Many of these films are actually being restored to their original quality.

And if they are not being restored to their original quality, they are being modernized. I have seen in YouTube, old black and white films being given the makeover. Color and even sound have been added to them.

It might seem that these old, silent, and black & white films have no relation to VHS and Betamax tapes, but as what would be explained later, these two physical video storage medias are related to each other.

Technology eventually developed which enabled the storage of colored videos with sound. However, during this time. These films were still stored in magnetic tapes which are more commonly known as “Film Reels.”

This technology has not really gone away yet. There are still many movie cinemas that use this type of physical video storage device. If you have seen one, you would easily realize that they are unwieldy to carry and could be delicate.

But over the years, many companies have produced varying sizes of these kinds of physical video storage media. Although there are people who use them for personal use, they tend to be expensive and are out of reach by most normal people.

By the 1970s, VHS and Betamax were invented. In case you’re wondering, VHS stands for Video Home System. Betamax meanwhile simply means Betamax. This was simply the name that Sony Corporation, the inventor of Betamax gave it.

The two physical video storage formats were still based on magnetic tape technology, but they were specially designed to be portable and to be mass used. They became bestsellers. Almost all households in developed and developing countries owned one.

They were not only very affordable, they also enabled the recording of television shows which became a hobby for many people. Not only this, they also emboldened people to film their own movies.

Though these physical video storage media also enabled the storage of films, they are more popular as a means to store music media. This may be due to their limited storage capacity. It takes a minimum of two CDs to store a single movie.

But they nevertheless signaled the beginning of the end of VHS and Betamax. Not only were CDs more compact and more portable. They were also less prone to damage. And probably the most important of all, they allowed the playing of movies in computers.

This means that people no longer needed to buy VHS and Betamax players. All they needed was a desktop computer or a laptop to unify all their digital viewing habits. This was now the era of computers and digitization. The end of the magnetic tape technology was coming.

These digital storage media soon followed. In case you’re wondering, DVD means Digital Versatile Disc. And is a significant advancement from CDs over the same digital technology.

DVDs enabled the storage of complete movies unlike CDs where you have to load the second CD in the CD player just to see the second half of the movie you are watching. But this is not its only advantage, it also offers superior audio and video quality over CDs.

Laser Discs followed. They are the album sized DVDs which offer much superior audio and video quality over regular DVDs. One of their main advantage is they make excellent display pieces because of their album like size.

Blue Ray Discs followed next. They have audio and video quality identical to Laser Discs, but still retain the form factor of a regular DVD. In effect, they are the high class versions of DVDs.

With the increasing storage spaces of physical digital media coupled by the lowering of their costs which made them not only affordable, but very cheap, one of the most popular ways in which movies started to be stored is in USBs.

In case you’re wondering, USB means Universal Serial Bus. They are not only so compact, but offers a much larger digital storage capacity than CDs or even DVDs. You can store several movies in one very small USB.

They heralded the end of DVDs. They were so popular that desktop laptop computers almost abandoned DVD players in exchange for them. It’s not unusual for a laptop owner to also own several USBs.

The era of the internet arrived when bandwidth speeds became so fast that it enabled the mass adoption of the internet as a way to view videos. Streaming services like Netflix became very popular.

Soon, video shops like Blockbuster closed up all their shops except one, because people were not watching movies anymore on DVDs in droves. The era of physical movie storage media is closing to an end.

As you can see from the timeline of the history of physical video storage media, VHS and Betamax tapes were the first ones to be adopted on a mass scale by consumers. They were also the first physical media which enabled a lot of people to record their own movies.

Now, let us follow the way movies are being stored in 2021 and beyond, and probably even much earlier. Only the movies made by the big name studios and several mid-tier movie companies are being saved.

A lot of movie companies have gone bankrupt or have ceased to exist even before the demise of the era of the VHS and betamax tapes. It just means that there are still a lot of movies that have not seen the light of day in the age of movie streaming.

I previously discussed about silent and black & white movies. Since VHS and betamax tapes were likely used to record these films, there is a good probability that there are VHS and betamax tapes out there that contain a piece of film history.

There may also be old colored films still in a storage room of a house gathering dust. It could be a low budget film that has not been shown in cinemas, but was privately screened to a select group of people.

And these very rare content of these VHS and Betamax tapes could be worth some money to the right buyers. For example, I saw a few YouTube videos of black and white films from the 1940s which showed actors from an Asian country speaking in English.

You don’t see these kinds of films often. According to the information on these YouTube videos, they were taken from VHS and betamax copies of the film which the private owner have diligently stored in his house.

You might be thinking: “But what this private VHS and Betamax owner is doing is illegal.” This might be true, but remember that there are already old film studios that have closed and even worse, have burned down complete with their movie film records.

I don’t know the technical and more importantly, the legal aspects of trying to copy the contents of a VHS or a Betamax tape. But I know one thing, there are people dedicated to collecting VHS and Betamax tapes. And you can legally sell the original tape you own.

There are Facebook groups who are dedicated to the buying, selling and collecting of VHS tape and Betamax tapes. Although VHS comes up more often than Betamax tapes in search articles, there are still people who collect them.

I won’t go over the issue as to whether there still a good value to be had in collecting mass produced VHS and Betamax tapes, there are other more detailed articles online that can better answer this question.

All you need to do for example is to use the Google search keywords: “Are VHS tapes worth anything?”, and you would immediately find articles discussing which VHS tapes are worth good money to be collected.

I have somewhat given an exhaustive explanation of the history of physical video storage. As what we can see, VHS and betamax tapes were the first ones to gain mass acceptance. There is a high probability that a lot of people backed up their old movies in them.

They also enabled amateur movie producers and small movie companies to make their own movies and sell them to cinemas and to select groups of people. These amateur movie producers and small movie companies might not exist anymore.

However, their movies might still exist somewhere and could be valuable to the right buyer. If these movies are really old and rare, they might still exist in VHS and Betamax tape format. You therefore might have a hidden gem in one of the VHS and Betamax tapes you own.

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