V-Lite: Disposable Lightweight VHS tape 

Same!

Me too

Yeah, I remember some promotional CD-ROMs (before DVDs were widespread) with video clips on them, but not V-Lite.

Same

same here! of course, by the time this came out here, i was busy being in my early-mid 20's and had moved onto to DVD

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed, it was making me feel old.

I had to come looking for this comment. I probably haven't seen that guy in 20 years, but they played those ads so much I guess he's permanently etched into my brain since I recognized him instantly.

Ben Curtis! Everyone thought he acted like a stoner, and then he lost the Dell gig for getting caught with a bag of marijuana in 2003. He was 20 when he filmed the Dell ads. He turns 43 this year. We are getting so old.

I was just about to post the same thing

THANK YOU! I thought it was James Franco's brother for a minute.

It reminds me of that spy TV show where the tape had a message at the end that would say, "This tape will self-destruct in 30 seconds "

Whoa! I've never come across one of these -- hilarious! Question -- Do you remember what movie it was? Dorkier Question -- Do you remember if it had on-sceen warnings that screeners typically had? You know: "FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY. THIS CASSETTE IS PROPERTY OF ...." Because that AND the time bomb magnet together would be outright adversarial!

@@blackcentury I do not remember the title of the movie but it did have the "Property of (studio) Not For Sale Or Rental" on screen at the bottom of the screen through the movie. There was a warning on the box that the tape would self erase after a certain number of plays.

@@brentfisher902 Mission Impossible?

I wonder if someone who did this now has a copy of a lost unreleased film

Did she get a chance?

Sounds like a fun exercice if anything

@@Epinardscaramelnah, this reeks of living vicariously through the students…

hope her teacher didn’t become a perfectionist diva living vicariously through the students!

Thank you! I was scrolling for a while looking for this answer.

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed that.

He got arrested buying a small amount of weed and was fired and blacklisted. The world probably owes him an apology.

I KNEW HE LOOKED FAMILIAR!!! THANK YOU!!!

@@palrich I didn't know that, what a bummer.

He got dumped and blacklisted over buying a bag of weed during the "Dell" campaign.

@@astralgilt My first thought when I saw that guy was "Dude I think that guy got me a Dell"

I recognized him the second he came up. I'm not shocked about the weed charge. Pretty stupid that got him fired.

Lol I knew it was that guy

​@@anonymousvampire9572 It was a different time. He was supposed to "just say no"

This is pretty critical info when trying to understand why this format might not have succeeded.

thats facinating

I have to imagine it would only make sense at super high quantities, and even then VHS were so dirt cheap by the 2000s the cost difference would have had to be negligible.

You're right -- I emailed Ben and yep he confirmed that it's him

Funny, I thought the exact same thing. Had it come out in the 80s, besides the larger environmental impact, I can totally imagine someone making a slightly more durable, 2-hour long version of it and it eventually becoming the new manufacturing standard for home video releases. Or at least for rentals, like those pointless disposable self-destructive DVDs.

@@WinterInTheForest The optimistic pessimist. The true chaotic neutral. I, too, am one.

Isn’t that the Dell guy in the V-Lite promo? Dude you’re getting a Dell!

We witnessed the fall of VHS in this very episode!

True

My first thoughts here as well!

that happens so often with some cassette tapes 😂

It's not just cheap tapes that get chewed up. LOL

Good point. My recollection of the "flow of dread" is that I usually worried more that a poor VCR would ruin a prized tape more than the other way around.

@@frankowalker4662 That's the point. If even quality tapes get chewed up, what are the chances these cheap-ass insecure tapes actually won't. 😆

The one in most distinctly remember was Meijer stores sent out a tape in the mid 1990s to towns that recently got a Meijer. You got a discount, if you returned the tape, but one friend of mine kept his, and it was funny watching it years later, because the acting of the customers was awful. Now it's on RU-vid for eternity.

Yup I still have some N64 era tape mailers around somewhere!

I received VHS tapes for the Sega Saturn and Street Fighter II (Genesis release), undoubtedly because of my Sega Visions magazine subscription.

@@litigioussociety4249 Just found it: MEIJER Supercenter Grand Opening Video Tour VHS [May 18th 1993]

I got a regular VHS tape as an invitation to attend a property seminar once. It had footage of the neighborhood and the homes they were trying to sell. Apparently they just sent it to random people, because I could barely afford to buy lunch back then.

Never heard of them before. A bit like the mission impossible self destruct mechanism but not si destructive 😆

Not another Flexplay

What would the point be in that? I guess if you rented a video that never needed to be returned it would be cool but you'd only get to watch twice and you'd still have to pay for the cost of the tape so it would be pretty expensive compared to rentals.

I'm guessing it wasn't hard to pry them open and remove the magnet...?

There was flexplay with VHS?? Never heard of them - but I would love seeing a video about them ^^ Just to see the mechanics - imagine how much engineering work went into something like this... to make a VHS tape erase itself.

I think it is recyclable anywhere with recycling facilities that can handle that. We had on local news that our city got one of those in 2011, barely a week later all the styrofoam burned in a fire and destroyed the machinery, which hasn't been replaced to this day. And since Knauf is 200 mile away and won't take it even of you bring them hundreds of tons... That's going in the landfill.

The Return-It depots in British Columbia started accepting polystyrene (resin code 6, expanded or not) a few years ago. To the best of my knowledge, no municipality here accepts it in curbside recycling collection, however.

The absolute hypocrisy of a Dell campaign by GSD&M, both keeping the cocaine business in Austin like Antone's kept the tourist blues going, is even more astonishing in retrospect.

I really appreciate his deadpan delivery.

You're doing a good job expressing your enjoyment with Techmoan's channel.

I think you just did 🙂

I can, the British accent, the quirky content, the snarky commentary, the obscure technology and the enthusiasm. One of the RU-vid’s greatest channels!

Truly amazing

One of only two channels I still eagerly watch. SAF is the other...they're too cute!

I scrolled down way too far for this comment! I was cracking up the second that dude appeared on screen. What are the odds that he would be on the one V-lite tape that Techmoan has?

I thought so too. I've emailed the actor.

It’d be like the setup to WALL-E.

I think at that point some folks would be burning them as heating or fuel🤣🤣🤣

Netflix originally sent people DVDs in the post...

@@TassieLorenzo They still did until a few months ago.

@@TassieLorenzo Fortunately, they weren't those insane self-destructing ones.

Do you still have that tape? Great story.

@@turnkit unfortunately no. NBC made us send it back. If I recall correctly, I think it was supposed to be called “Dads.” Completely unrelated to the show of the same name on Fox in 2013.

If the tape only costs 20 cents they shouldn't need it back.

@@MrGeocidal The idea was probably more about not wanting their unreleased pilots floating around in the wild than anything to do with the cost of the tapes.

I thought so too, i think it is.

Yeah it's him. Even same delivery style.

We live in a post-format world. Fortunately for us, Mr Moan does not.

If he did, I suspect it would be along the lines of Elcaset.

There are still a myriad of digital formats competing

​@@weltschmerz88 Nothing that requires a proprietary player or initial investment to use, all file formats play on just about everything so technically competitive in a business sense but when it comes to cultural impact or mindshare no one really cares if the file is mp3 or mp4 or wav or whatever, they all play.

Who's to say he doesn't use his Time Machine to go back to the past and retroactively create these :^)

I'm 30 1/2 and I've never heard of them either, at least not where I live. Seeing that they were used mostly for promotional material, it makes sense.

Same here. Never saw one before or heard of it. I’ve seen many promotional tapes that were mailed back in the day. Not one was ever one of these.

I am 42 years old, I never heard of them before.

If any at all!

Hopefully you get at least as many ejections as plays.

The world may never know.

A rewind would absolutely destroy it! "This tape will self destruct" lol

@@Broken_robot1986 Good Morning, Mr Phelps ... ☺

That's where the economies of scale and good old competition come in to play. When the VHS first came out you would have to pay something like $20 each for the tapes adjusted for inflation it'd be close to $100.00 for one blank tape then as it became more and more mainstream lots of different manufacturers jumped in the market. By the end of the VHS era I'd wager that each manufacturer was making more percentage wise per tape than they did when each tape cost $20 each.

Yeah, and blank audio cassettes. Meanwhile they could stamp out blank CDs and DVDs by the millions and they cost a fortune for a long time.

When VHS was young cassettes cost quite a bit. Blank tapes in the early 80s were like $25USD/ea ($96 adjusted for inflation), but pre-recorded ones were $50-80 ($192-308) depending on the movie or show. IIRC the initial market for pre-recorded cassettes weren't consumers, but rental companies. This meant that while cassettes needed to be as inexpensive as reasonably possible, it also meant they needed to be durable enough to tolerate a lot of handling and playback sessions. Most people who bought a movie typically got it from a rental companies that was downsizing it's stock of particular titles to make room for new ones. This is why VHS had a spring-loaded door with a latch, and brakes to stop the reels from unspooling in transport, unlike professional formats like U-Matic that just had a small flap and free-spinning reels.

They were very expensive at the start as the other replies explained, as were VCRs. Fabrication methods are costed down over time and made more efficient and when you have multiple companies jumping in to get their cut of the pie, it becomes a race to the bottom until everything a consumer is required to get becomes more widely affordable for everyone. Same thing happened with the pocket calculator market in the 70s.

@@IvanKowalenko If I remember with U-Matic or 3/4" tape, the cassette case/holder itself gripped the hubs for transport. You almost never saw a 3/4" tape without it's case, since the spine was a useful place to put a label on the shelf. The 3M tape cassette holders had the special hook insert so you could hang it on the wall with a hanging rail system they had. Rather smart system that meant you didn't have to build a shelf that could hold the weight of such a library of tapes, you just needed wall space to mount the rail on. But this only worked for 3M tapes, I don't think Sony, Fuji, Ampex, etc had a shelf system like that. The only reason VHS movie releases were in the insane pricing they were was because the studio's jacked up the prices on VHS movies when they realized the majority of their titles were being bought by rental houses. They couldn't go after them for the number of views a tape had in home, i.e. how many $3/rental fees the tape did in it's lifetime, and instead did the next best thing and just made the video rental companies pay through the nose to acquire the copies. The price of Laserdiscs and RCA's CED Videodisc releases were usually $19.99. And I think Laserdiscs still maintained the edge in pricing later on when VHS tape manufacture and duplication came way down. Stamping a disc versus making a tape copy was still cheaper, and probably faster too! But alas, video on a disc didn't become the defacto until DVD came along.

There was a 1980s revival of _Mission: Impossible,_ but I haven't seen any of it in decades, so I can't remember how the updated mission briefing scenes worked.

Even back in early 2000s I remember we'd go to the DVD rental with my parents about every week or so and select one or two movies for the week end, for sure "content" was not a thing, or the commodity it is nowaydays...

@@yyunko7764 Even in 2009 because my family was poor back then we went to blockbuster alot and picked up some VHS movies for family movie night. We didn't get a CD/DVD player till 2012 or so

The mechanism has nothing to do with it, just a storage medium. They were one shot or a couple of play only and the tape was the same (well almost as we used damaged pancakes) The tape path in a video player is massive and rarely if ever will it be the tape that causes a jam.. It will be dirty rollers etc (or the two year old posting 2p into it)

The tape is the same, so the quality would be the same as any other VHS running at that speed. The compromise from the build quality is with the longevity. Between the lacking of a door after its first use, all the moving parts just rubbing, and it's flimsy construction not resisting any sort of abuse these would not last long.

I got one of those once, but when I went all Ben Heck on mine it didn't have any removable media, or even any easily re-usable parts. I tracked down the manufacturer, and that's a "feature" they brag about: the anti-tamper/non-reusability of their promotional video player :( I scored a hall effect switch, a magnet and a baby Li-ion battery.

Weird, never heard of this

Love to hear how data was shared and that kind of thing created back then! Cool story!

Thankyou! Answered my one big question! Could you record over them! And you say yes!! Appreciate your comment!

Yeah I think so!

What happened to your VHS collection? I _still_ have several hundred DVDs that I can watch anytime I want with no issues whatsoever. A significant number are still in shrink-wrap.

It looks like that might've been SUEDE - GIVE ME HEAD 1999 PROMO FILM, a 4 minute V-Lite in PAL. There's an eBay listing for it now, although it calls it a "V-Light" in the description.

You can’t even give them away to charity shops .

@@stevenclarke5606 Ah it's sad, but it's one of many similar stories of obsolete media. At least there is TechMoan documenting them all!

Future generations will be mining landfills for raw materials.

The British guy inside my head: "Bit sad innit?"

Fr lol 😂

🚭

Getting high on that V-Lite 👽

A similarly environmentally unsound product.

A lot of people these days only have a smartphone and an iPad or similar at home. The latest iPads would be able to play it if you have the correct adapter, but they probably don't have that.

Inside Schwartz sounds like a funny idea-for a 5-minute comedy sketch. Anything more than that would soon get annoying.

20 dollar shitty ebay capture card has worked pretty well for me

I was hoping to see this comment! 🤣

Dude, you're getting a call back!

@@wifigod I am glad someone still remembers

I seem to have missed that bit. But if you put it in water, I'm sure it would float. That actually would have been a fun thing to do.

Raise your hand if you’re guilty of having archived Technoan episodes to VHS for safe keeping

@@dgeoffri I used to, but I recently moved to a smaller apartment and I had to put them all on Hi-8.