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				Amazon USA Associate VHS (short for Video Home System) is a 
				standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape 
				cassettes. Developed by Victor Company of Japan (JVC) in the 
				early 1970s, it was released in Japan on September 9, 1976 and 
				in the United States on August 23, 1977. 
				 
				From the 1950s, magnetic tape video recording became a major 
				contributor to the television industry, via the first 
				commercialized video tape recorders (VTRs). At that time, the 
				devices were used only in expensive professional environments 
				such as television studios and medical imaging (fluoroscopy). In 
				the 1970s, videotape entered home use, creating the home video 
				industry and changing the economics of the television and movie 
				businesses. The television industry viewed videocassette 
				recorders (VCRs) as having the power to disrupt their business, 
				while television users viewed the VCR as the means to take 
				control of their hobby. 
				 
				In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a format war in the home 
				video industry. Two of the standards, VHS and Betamax, received 
				the most media exposure. VHS eventually won the war, dominating 
				60 percent of the North American market by 1980 and emerging as 
				the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period. 
				Optical disc formats later began to offer better quality than 
				analog consumer video tape such as VHS and S-VHS. The earliest 
				of these formats, LaserDisc, was not widely adopted. However, 
				after the introduction of the DVD format in 1997, VHS's market 
				share began to decline. By 2008, DVD had replaced VHS as the 
				preferred low-end method of distribution. The last known company 
				in the world to manufacture VHS equipment, Funai of Japan, 
				ceased production in July 2016.  |