Saved by the Numbers

A few handy stats for the home revolution

So maybe you're not one of the 2.8 million Americans who own a videotape machine. Maybe you don't even live in one of the estimated 22 million households wired for cable. Does that mean you have to be silent while everyone else natters on with lofty ideas about the "video revolution"? Absolutely not! Herewith a few handy statistics to toss into all the heady talk. Just two hints for beginners: never speak of Betamaxes (that's not a generic term, it's a Sony product name); and never call those dandy $1,000 gizmos videotape machines. They are VCRs, and never mind what the initials stand for.

154.7%. The increase in VCR exports from Japan to the U.S. between August 1980 and August 1981. Japan, which manufactures 95% of the machines, will produce 20 million VCRs by the end of 1984.

75% for Time Shift. No, this has nothing to do with productivity on an assembly line. It merely shows that, according to the Field Research Corp., three-quarters of the people who own VCRs use them to record programs off the air and watch them at a later time. They then re-use the tape, thus erasing the program and undercutting the dire conjectures of the movie companies that VCR owners would stockpile films at home and stop going to the neighborhood Bijou. Some 75% of the VCR owners questioned did admit they had tape libraries, but most meant 15 tapes or fewer. Only 23% said they were building substantial cassette libraries.

$10 Billion by 1985. Projected factory sales of blank tape for the next few years. Big Mylar and big moola. Since most VCR owners now buy just 20 tapes, this figure allows not only for expectations of greater machine sales but an increase in demand for prerecorded cassettes.

20 Per Year. The mean number of prerecorded tapes rented by a VCR owner. In 1979, the smart money was still on software; prerecorded tapes will be like records, albeit (at an average price of $69) expensive records. Nowadays the smart money has wised up, and the action has moved to rentals. Why pay the price to own Ordinary People when you can pay a fraction of the cost (sometimes as little as a dollar a day) to rent it? Now the movie companies want in. "We couldn't continue to invest millions of dollars to feed this market and not get any of it back," says Leon Knize, senior marketing vice president for Warner Home Video, explaining why his company has switched from a sales to a rental-only policy.

$200 Million Tube Job. The investment RCA made in the videodisc machine and the amount it stands to lose if the discs do not catch on. The disc machine, unlike the tape, cannot copy; it can only play. It excels as a teaching tool, but RCA has marketed it for consumer entertainment, where it has fared poorly compared with tape. The bright hope is what vid whizzes call interactive discs. These can instruct the viewer in a variety of pursuits or, wired through a home computer, can let him seek specific help. On one prototype, for example, a viewer with a troublesome bicycle can pinpoint the malfunctioning part of a two-wheeler, and the disc will show him how to repair it. Unfortunately, RCA would have to redesign its existing machines to enable them to play these interactive discs. If interactives are indeed the salvation of disc machines, RCA's are incompatible with the future.

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