Charles Band: The Accidental Pioneer

It's hard to believe it today, but when VCRs first became available for the average American family, the major studios didn't see them as a lucrative new revenue stream. Like compact discs, DVDs, and the Internet, many swore it wouldn't catch on. At first, not many seemed eager to dive in; instead they cautiously dipped their toes into the ocean.

Most didn't see home video as a potential goldmine, not even one of its pioneers, Charles Band, who got into the business nearly by accident. He started a home video company while he made low budget horror and sci-fi films; at first it was just a hobby, but it blew up into an enormous business practically overnight. Band was also a pioneer in the 1980s, when he created horror and adult-themed video games during what was effectively the video game stone age. Band now takes a look back at the pioneer days of home entertainment for TwitchGuru, and reflects on how far we've come since then.

Charles Band

People have been predicting that we'd all be able to watch movies at home since the early 1970s, but it took a long time before the technology would be affordable for the average home. The first Betamax machines weren't available in America until the late '70s. The tape you'd use to record a program or movie from TV was ¾", which was bulky, and could only hold 30 to 60 minutes. Eventually, the cassettes would be more compact, and able to record hours of programs - but Charles Band wasn't thinking that far ahead yet.

Band's father, Albert, was also a director, and Charles grew up loving films and hanging around his father's sets. Eventually, Charles amassed a collection of about a hundred films he'd screen for friends. In the '70s, being a film collector meant you had prints of your favourite films on 16 mm. Band had a cool underground movie club because you couldn't just go buy those prints like you can buy a movie today at a local shop.

Most film buffs weren't so lucky. If you wanted to see your favourite movies back then, you had to scan the TV Guide and make sure you were home when it was shown on network television. Alternately, you could go to a revival theatre, if your town had one. But if you wanted to watch a movie whenever you felt like it? Forget it.

So it wasn't hard to figure out even then that if the technology were readily available and affordable, people would use it to watch their favourite movies at home at their convenience. Band says, "having the experience of being a young guy screening classic movies for friends, I just knew as a consumer that the notion of purchasing a movie to have and enjoy again and again, and screen it for friends, was a very valuable deal."