my roommate asked if I could find a copy of the TV show Home Movies and instead I found this

interesting that it came out in two years but had the same number

also it sounds like someone made a porno version of Americans funniest home videos, right?

but the real, non-porno version of that came out in 1989.

so did America's Funniest Home Videos rip off the porn version?

or maybe I'm misinterpreting what the date means:
it's not a show from 1980/1985 that was home-video porn, it's a show (from some more recent year) that focuses on home video porn FROM that year.

which doesn't make a ton of sense.
the Sony Betacam, which was the first consumer camcorder, came out in 1983.
if you were making home porn in 1980, it would have been .... difficult. (I'm not gonna say "hard")

you would have had to get a VCR of some kind, plus a separate camera unit.
While these were available in portable units, they were typically a two-person job:

you'd have one person operating the camera, and another carrying the technically-portable tape recorder and batteries.

So that's a minimum of FOUR PEOPLE just to produce a decent home video sex tape! god forbid you consider lighting and a boom mic operator...

although to be fair: in 1970s it was common to record porn without sound, and then have people dub in the "sex noises" later. this is also where the trope of the porno-bass-jazz riff comes from: they put music onto it to not have silent porn with occasional dubbed moans.

I'M JUST SAYING, IN 1980 THERE WASN'T A LOT OF AMATEUR HOME PORN FILMS, CAUSE IT WAS REALLY DIFFICULT TO MAKE HOME MOVIES AT ALL

although I am assuming we're talking about videotape here.

You could have gone for film. Super 8 was common and available, but it has to be developed...

do you want to drop off your sex tape at the chemists to have it developed? Not many people did.

(This is related to why Polaroid got a reputation for being "sleazy": it made taking nude pictures a lot more viable)

anyway I'm downloading Home Movies now.

No, not the porn version. I hope?

also man, it's interesting exactly HOW MUCH those lines say "I WAS MADE IN MACROMEDIA FLASH"

also, I would like to applaud myself for calling this "betacam" when I got the picture from the wikipedia article on camcorders, which calls it betamovie, the jpeg file is named Sony_Betamovie_BMC-100P.jpgm, and it says BETAMOVIE RIGHT ON THE FUCKING THING

betacam is a separate videotape format Sony introduced in 1982, for professional video use.
It uses the same cassettes as Betamax, but encodes them differently and runs the tapes much faster for higher quality.

interestingly, betacam as a format evolved instead of being replaced: in 1993 Sony released Digital Betacam, which used the same tapes but with (SURPRISE!) digital encoding, letting you put lossless component video on the tape at 720x486 (NTSC) with 4 channels of 48kHz PCM audio

then in 2001 they added MPEG IMX: it's digital betacam, but instead of DCT compression, it now uses MPEG-2 encoding, similar to DVD (but with better color and bitrate)
So yeah, it's a professional DVD-tape.

They also continued the use of MPEG IMX encoding onto their XDCAM series of professional camcorders, in 2003.
Which instead used a new Sony format: Professional Disc.
It was one of the first optical formats to use a blue-laser, 3 years before Blu-ray (and HD-DVD)

Sony (who are less of an electronics company than they are an excuse to introduce new proprietary formats), then in 2008 created a new storage format for XDCAM cameras:
SxS Pro!
This is a flash storage card, in the form factor of ExpressCard (the evolution of PCMCIA)

Although for the Sony XDCAM EX cameras, you can get an adapter to let you instead use...

XQD! Another Sony format, released in 2010. It's based on PCI-e (similar to how Compact Flash is basically "IDE but in a different shape")

or if you want, you can always get the adapter to let you instead use Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo cards.

Hey, Sony?
I'm not saying you invent too many formats, but most companies don't make a product that has the ability to write to 4 different formats (with adapters), ALL OF WHICH YOU FUCKING INVENTED

(although, to be fair, there's also an adapter for SD cards.
Sony didn't develop SD cards, that was a joint effort between SanDisk, Panasonic, and Toshiba)

Sony didn't get in on SD cards because they were still trying to push Memory Stick back then.

(Which clearly worked really well)

I'm honestly surprised Sony didn't respond to the "failure" of memory stick against SD by making a new format.

After all, I'm pretty sure the Sony HQ is just a big room with a giant red button labeled "INVENT NEW MEDIA FORMAT"

OH WAIT THEY DID.
in 2006 they did a joint-venture with SanDisk to invent a new memory card format: M2, aka Memory Stick Micro.

Although please note that these cards are not compatible with microSD, or with Sony's PlayStation Vita memory card format (released in 2011)

Sony is a company that sees a world facing a lot of problems and the only way they can try to help solve them is by inventing a new media format

in 2016 Sony did a temporary exhibit called "It's a Sony" to celebrate 70 years of the company, and one whole wall was just "here's all the formats we invented"

picture from The Verge, who did a neat article on it with a lot of great photos: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/11/27/13751418/sony-design-history-products-tokyo-ginza-exhibit

although I mock them, as a collector of weird and obscure and failed media formats, I love them for this.
No other company has been willing to take as many risks as Sony, and has put out as much stuff, good and bad.

although really you shouldn't be using "does foone like them for doing this?" as a good barometer for if it's a good idea in general.
I am not a typical person in this regard.

like, personally I'd love nothing more than for some company to try to bring floppies back.

Is that good idea in general, in 2020?

NO! ARE YOU FUCKING HIGH?

You could use the latest technology from hard drives and build a terabyte-storing 2" floppy disk and it'd still be a worse idea than just using an SSD.