http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-final-goodbye-of-the-vcr.html?_r=0
Yes, but was it BetaMax or was it that new-fangled VHS stuff? 
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Yeah, but people still make buggy whipsā¦
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Interesting to note that it was the DMCA that actually stopped VCRs, not HDTV, etc. There is no reason you canāt demodulate / decode and save to a ātapeā and then play it back later. However, the Industry and Advertisers lobbied for the DMCA and then put provisions into the HTDV standard for encryption and copy/playback protection.
Recording a clear-text version of anything not FTA (marked in the bitstream) runs you afoul of the DMCA, so the Industry has an effective way of getting rid of clear-text copies which can be shared while also (for the large part) eliminating skipping adverts.
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ā¦ and donāt get me started on Cable TV: they were spanked once for requiring set top boxes ($/mo rent) back when TVs didnāt have integrated tuners that would do cable. Now, with digital cable, theyāre back! Either pay rent to them for a STB for each TV, or rent a cable card to do the same thing if your TV is āDigital Readyā.
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Yep, @bitta comes to mind. And some of us like glow bugsā¦
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That is an awesome build. What tubes does it use, again?
(Feel free to split this off to Amateur Radio. I canāt do that yet.)
Seriously. I have a friend who works at AT&T who was complaining about all the regulation and interop requirements. I had to remind him how badly the cable industry has behaved before ATT even got an eye on selling it ā trying to run off Tivo, time delay, and VOD long before anybody even had it. (whatās up, innovation?)
So, like, sorry youāre concerned that a 3rd party might try to run ads on the channel select page and you canāt? Or wait, Iām not, because I hate that stuff and part of the reason I ditched cable.
I disagree about DMCA killing VHS though. Crappy video quality killed VHS. You can buy a BluRay recorder nowā¦ or even a had drive recorder. Why would you want to down-sample to something with 40 columns of chroma?
For that old-timey feeling! 
I suppose āVideo Recordingā is what the DMCA killed. You pick the format: VHS, Beta, SVHS, Digital 8mm, etc.
Hasnāt HDCP been cracked at this point?
Yes, but not practical for a commercial product to implement.
The ash heap of history is littered with aborted ideas due to DRM and greed.
Anybody remember the DAT? Before anti-skip technology was perfected for CD players, Digital Audio Tape was the heir-apparent to the cassette tape. But the rights holders were afraid of the propagation of perfect digital copies of content, so they lobbied intensely to severely restrict or even kill it.
Sony was the inventor of DAT. Perhaps in an attempt to soften opposition to DAT, Sony bought CBS Records, one of the leading members of the opposition.
It did not work as DAT was relegated to professional studios and computer data backup applications.
Sony would then go on to cut off its nose to spite its faceā¦
Anybody remember the Sony WalkMan?
When portable MP3 players were making their debut, Sony, now a media owner, found itself on the other side of the debate. While names like Diamond Rio and the Microsoft Zune have faded into obscurity due to high cost and low capacity, Sony lost out on a huge opportunity to introduce the MP3 Walkman when Mooreās Law made the necessary amounts of storage affordable. An opportunity moribund Apple Computer saw fit to pounce on with their iPod and where is Sony today?
And DAT had to be incompatible with CD. The sample rate couldnāt be 44k - not even a multiple of. 48k. At the time sample rate converting gave mixed results and was extremely crunch intensive. If we canāt control/kill it, then weāll make inconvenient to use.
That might have been true at one point, but I definitely used a DAT machine with 44.1 kHz.
From Wikipedia page:
Some early machines aimed at the consumer market did not operate at 44.1 kHz when recording so they could not be used to ācloneā a compact disc.