Cartrivision is an analog

videocassette Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocassette ...

format introduced in 1972, and the first format to offer

feature film A feature film or feature-length film is a narrative film (motion picture or "movie") with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term ''feature film'' originall ...

s for consumer rental.1972: Cartrivision — The First VCR with Prerecorded Tapes
CED Magic, cedmagic.com. Article retrieved 2006-12-22. Cartrivision was produced by Frank Stanton's Cartridge Television, Inc. (CTI), a subsidiary of

Avco Avco Corporation is a subsidiary of Textron which operates Textron Systems Corporation and Lycoming. History The Aviation Corporation was formed on March 2, 1929, to prevent a takeover of CAM-24 airmail service operator Embry-Riddle Compa ...

,"Cartrivision — The First ALL American Home VCR!"
LabGuy's World (labguysworld.com). Article last updated 2005-01-09, retrieved 2006-12-22. who also owned

Embassy Pictures Embassy Pictures Corporation (also and later known as Avco Embassy Pictures as well as Embassy Films Associates) was an American independent film Production company, production and Film distributor, distribution studio responsible for such fil ...

at the time. Cartrivision was available in the form of a

TV set A television set or television receiver, more commonly called the television, TV, TV set, telly, tele, or tube, is a device that combines a tuner, display, and loudspeakers, for the purpose of viewing and hearing television broadcasts, or using ...

with a built-in recorder for the format. Cartrivision recorders and sets were manufactured by

, a company that CTI partnered with to manufacture and develop the format, as well as Admiral,

Packard Bell Packard Bell is a Dutch-registered computer manufacturing brand and subsidiary of Acer. Originally an American radio set manufacturer, Packard Bell Corporation, it was founded by Herbert A. Bell and Leon S. Packard in 1933. In 1986, Israeli in ...

, Emerson,

Montgomery Ward Montgomery Ward is the name of two successive U.S. retail corporations. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a world-pioneering mail-order business and later also a leading department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001. The curren ...

, and

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...

, the latter two marketing Cartrivision sets under their own brand names in their stores. While Montgomery Ward's TV used the Admiral chassis, as did all Montgomery Ward airline TVs, Admiral marketed their own Cartrivision with a different chassis. The first model of Cartrivision-equipped TV set sold for US $1,350Television on a Disk
''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'', Sept. 18, 1972. Retrieved 2006-12-22. (), and was the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies available for rent.

History

Avco Corp. introduced Cartrivision at the

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

in New York in June 1970. It was first sold in June 1972, mainly through Sears,

Macy's Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American chain of high-end department stores founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It became a division of the Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, through which it is affiliated wi ...

, and Montgomery Ward

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic app ...

s in the United States. Manufacture ended thirteen months later in July 1973 after poor sales. Later, it was found that Cartrivision tapes that had been stored in a warehouse had disintegrated due to humidity. After the demise of Cartrivision in 1973, many Cartrivision-equipped TV sets, separate recording mechanisms, tapes, and other parts and accessories were liquidated by surplus retailers, mainly in California, and many electronic hobbyists bought quite a few of the Cartrivision systems. Some made their own homebrew modifications with the hardware, such as a stand-alone Cartrivision player in its own chassis with an

RF modulator An RF modulator (or radio frequency modulator) is an electronic device whose input is a baseband signal which is used to modulate a radio frequency source. RF modulators are used to convert signals from devices such as media players, VCRs and ...

to hook it up to any TV set, much like later VCRs.

Design

Like Philips'

Video Cassette Recording Video Cassette Recording (VCR) is an early domestic analog recording format designed by Philips. It was the first successful consumer-level home videocassette recorder (VCR) system. Later variants included the VCR-LP and Super Video (SVR) forma ...

(VCR) format (introduced at the same time in Europe), the square Cartrivision cassette had the two reels of half-inch

magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magne ...

mounted on top of each other, but it could record up to 114 minutes. It did so using an open loop helical scan "

skip-field In video, skip field recording is a process in which only one field (one half of a frame) of video is recorded in order to conserve recording media space. For some kinds of recording, the quality loss of not using both fields of video is fairly ...

" form of

video format Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...

that recorded every other

video field In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame. When the fields are displayed on a video monitor they are "interlaced" so th ...

and played it back three times. Citing "the present invention (of recording and playback) represents an improvement over the prior conventional skip-field systems." Such conventional systems are described in issued to Kihara on Dec. 19, 1967.

Retail

Cassettes of major movies such as ''

The Bridge on the River Kwai ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'' is a 1957 epic war film directed by David Lean and based on the 1952 novel written by Pierre Boulle. Although the film uses the historical setting of the construction of the Burma Railway in 1942–1943, the pl ...

'', ''

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ''Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' is a 1967 American romantic comedy-drama film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, and written by William Rose. It stars Spencer Tracy (in his final role), Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn, and featur ...

'', ''

Dr. Strangelove ''Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'', known simply and more commonly as ''Dr. Strangelove'', is a 1964 black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and t ...

'', ''

High Noon ''High Noon'' is a 1952 American Western film produced by Stanley Kramer from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starring Gary Cooper. The plot, which occurs in real time, centers on a town marshal whose sense of ...

'', ''

It Happened One Night ''It Happened One Night'' is a 1934 pre-Code American romantic comedy film with elements of screwball comedy directed and co-produced by Frank Capra, in collaboration with Harry Cohn, in which a pampered socialite (Claudette Colbert) tries ...

'', ''

Divorce Italian Style ''Divorce Italian Style'' ( it, Divorzio all'italiana) is a 1961 Italian dark comedy film directed by Pietro Germi. The screenplay is by Germi, Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti, and Agenore Incrocci, based on Giovanni Arpino's novel '' Un de ...

'', ''

The Quiet Man ''The Quiet Man'' is a 1952 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by John Ford. It stars John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen. The screenplay by Frank S. Nugent was based on a 1933 '' Saturday ...

'', ''

The Belles of St Trinian's ''The Belles of St Trinian's'' is a 1954 British comedy film, directed by Frank Launder, co-written by Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and starring Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Hermione Baddeley. Inspired by British cartoonist Rona ...

'', ''

Two Rode Together ''Two Rode Together'' is a 1961 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring James Stewart, Richard Widmark, and Shirley Jones. The supporting cast includes Linda Cristal, Andy Devine, and John McIntire. The film was based upon th ...

'' and ''

Brother Rat ''Brother Rat'' is a 1938 American comedy drama film about cadets at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, directed by William Keighley, and starring Ronald Reagan, Priscilla Lane, Eddie Albert (in his film debut), Jane Wyman, and ...

''Cumberland Evening Times 6 July 1972 Page 11
/ref> were ordered via the initial 200-movie catalog at a

retailer Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

, delivered by parcel mail, and then returned to the retailer after viewing. These rental cassettes were red, approximately high by wide by deep (however used the same videotape used today) and could not be rewound by a home Cartrivision recorder. Rather, they were rewound by a special machine upon their return to the retailer.Cartrivision Cassette
mrbetamax.com. Article retrieved 2006-12-22. Other cassettes on sports, travel, art, and

how-to The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a dormant an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux-related documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for hackers to share their documentation wi ...

topics were available for purchase. These cassettes were black, and could be rewound on a Cartrivision recorder. An optional

monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochrom ...

camera manufactured for Cartrivision by

Eumig EUMIG was an Austrian company producing audio and video equipment that existed from 1919 until 1982. The name is an acronym for ''Elektrizitäts und Metallwaren Industrie Gesellschaft'', or, translated, the "Electricity and Metalware Industry Comp ...

could be bought to make home videos. A color camera was in the works but never materialized before CTI's demise.

References

External links

Cartrivision.com

The Cartrivision Site

Video of "I Am Cartrivision", a demo video released on Cartrivision cassette to retailers

Cartrivison's appearance on ''What's My Line?''
(on

Buzzr Buzzr is an American digital terrestrial television, digital broadcast television network owned by Fremantle North America, a unit of the Fremantle (company), Fremantle subsidiary of RTL Group. The network serves as an outlet for the extensive li ...

YouTube channel)
Details of a Cartrivision cassette

* ttps://youtube.com/watch?v=HcpouZiZ4UE Video demonstration of a working Cartrivision unit in 2022{{Homevid Audiovisual introductions in 1972 1973 disestablishments in the United States Discontinued media formats Video storage

History

Design

Retail

See also

References

External links