Cassette-bursting medium revived for latest Alien chest-burster flick
could understand why 20th Century Studios has announced that it will release the film on VHS – the video cassette format that hasn't been relevant for two decades and had a crap reputation even in its heyday.For those of you who worked hard to forget VHS or are mercifully too young to have encountered it, the format was developed by Japan's JVC and used recordable analog tapes.
By the 1980s, VHS machines made their way into a great many living rooms and boardrooms. Cheap blank tapes and timing mechanisms in VCRs – Video Cassette Recorders, the blanket term for machines that played VHS or Betamax tapes – made it possible to record live television and watch it later at your leisure."Time shifting" – as the practice was known – begat Tivo, which begat Netflix, which brings us to the streaming era of today.
VHS tapes were horrible. They were unreliable. They wore out with use. They often spooled tape into the VCR. Picture and sound quality were dire. When DVDs came along in the late 1990s, their relative resilience – plus superior audio and video – allowed them to dominate, even though they couldn't easily be used to record TV shows.Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warpedthe release of Alien: Romulus – the latest instalment in a franchise dating back to 1979 – on VHS on December 3.
The studio hasn't explained why it would effectively downgrade its own work by transcoding it to VHS, other than to say it's a celebration of the Alien franchise's 45th anniversary. is struggling to imagine a large central region in a hypothetical Venn diagram charting people who want to see the movie again and people who have working VHS players.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Games Inbox: Is Alien Isolation the scariest video game ever?Today’s reader’s Inbox celebrates 10 years of Alien Isolation, as a reader is upset that LittleBigPlanet is currently offline only.
Read more »
McLaren’s one-second-a-lap dominance is “alien” to VerstappenMcLaren’s recent supremacy doesn’t bode well for Red Bull’s title prospects
Read more »
Scientists search for signs of 'alien intelligence' in nearby solar system“This research shows that we are getting closer to technology and methods that could detect radio signals similar to the ones we send into space.”
Read more »
One of the biggest alien discoveries in history was completely made upThe Man Who Loved UFOs is landing on Netflix soon – find out about the film's bizarre true story of José de Zer's fake alien sightings here.
Read more »
Moment Nasa spacecraft blasts off to hunt alien lifeIt is set to arrive in 2030 - and what it finds could change what we know about life in our solar system.
Read more »
Alien Isolation sequel officially in developmentAfter ten long years, Sega and Creative Assembly have announced that an Alien: Isolation sequel is officially in early development.
Read more »