Topic summary
OVAs
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Original video animation.
History
OVAs originated during the early 1980s. As the VCR became a commonplace in Japanese homes, the anime industry grew. Demand for anime became so massive that consumers would go to video stores to buy new animation outright. While people in the United States used the phrase "direct-to-video" as a pejorative for works that could not make it onto television or movie screens, in Japan direct-to-video became common practice.