By Brian Boone

In January 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that recording TV shows onto videocassettes  didn’t violate copyright law. Sony Corp. was a party to the case because of its Betamax home video system, and the ruling threw open the market. VHS would emerge as the winner, but Betamax was just one of many ultimate “losers” in the first home video format war. Here are some other failed and forgotten methods to watch movies at home.

CED (1981)

In a distant third-place in the 1980s home video sector, after JVC’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax: RCA’s Capacitance Electronic Disc, or SelectaVision. Movies came recorded onto what looked like a grooved, vinyl record, and CEDs worked in much the same way. A needle read the embedded digital data and converted it to a video signal displayed on a connected TV as the disc spun at 450 rotations a minute. Those video records had to be encased in plastic because any dust at all would render them unplayable by the $1,000 (at 1981 prices) SelectaVision player. Fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing was all impossible, making the format a non-starter against VHS and Betamax, which came along far later than CEDs, which RCA started developing in 1964. By 1986, when RCA discontinued the SelectaVision, only 150,000 players had sold, losing the company $600 million. 

SUPER 8

Super 8 worked very well to record countless precious memories as home movies for millions of Americans in the ‘60s. It sold so well that inventor Kodak tried to make Super 8 a home video format in the 1970s, around the same time that VHS and Betamax players hit stores. The space on those film reels was limited, however, meaning consumers had to frequently change them out when projecting a movie at home. The Godfather, for example, came on 11 reels. That made it expensive: That film cost $300. Other, single-reel movies consisting of 15 minutes worth of highlights were another option, but with full movies available on one tape in the VHS and Betamax formats made Super 8 movies a hard format to justify. It was discontinued in 1984. 

DIVX

Millions of people bought expensive DVD players in 1998 and 1999, and to help soften the financial blow, Circuit City partnered with some manufacturers to make machines that cost only about $300. The catch: Those devices were actually DIVX players, which played special DVDs sold only by Circuit City. DIVX discs cost $5 and self-erased after 48 hours, making them more of a way to rent movies than add to one’s personal film library. Circuit City was heavily criticized for all of the electronic waste it would potentially generate with all those discarded, useless DIVX discs, but it ultimately wasn’t much of a problem because the format proved to be a flop. DVD players and movies continued to sell while DIVX was discontinued seven months after its launch. Circuit City even gave $100 rebates to the customers who had purchased the players which were useless as of June 1999. 

UMD

Sony’s digital music format the MiniDisc — a tiny disc encased in plastic — was popular in Japan and with audiophiles in the U.S. in the 1990s, but not with the general American public. In 2004, Sony relaunched the idea as a video format called the Universal Media Disc, or UMD. It wasn’t actually all that universal, because movies recorded onto UMD cartridges only worked in Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld video game system. While 80 million people used their PSPs, they weren’t interested in anything besides gaming. UMD movies cost $30 — double a DVD and with lesser video quality. Sony kept pushing UMD discs to an uncaring world until 2014.