The self-erasing 2View Video Tape (UPDATED)
Today I’m able to share with you an almost mythical failed format, the 2View, the pre-recorded videotape that erased itself after, you guessed it, two views.
I was aware of these but due to its limited release I’d never seen one in person and thought it unlikely that I ever would. That was until a kind Patron named Sebastiaan spotted one being sold on Marktplaats and offered to send it over. So thanks to him, we all now get to have a good look at this one…it’s a doozy.
I like this video - I think it came together well. There were a lot of different elements that I needed to combine and I’m never able to tell until the edit stage whether a video feels like it’s all going to gel so I was happy to discover that this one did.
It might be difficult to believe but this one was recorded over three days and then edited for another two.
I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again to Sebastiaan and to everyone take care and enjoy your week.
UPDATED - The number one request from early viewers was to see the mechanism defeated by the paperclip. As a result I have inserted the appropriate clip (literally) at around the 19 minute 41 second point in the video. The updated video is the one now embedded and linked to above.
Comments (68)
They had a similar item for DVDs that was sold in the early 2000s. The DVD would erase after two viewings.
I don't understand how that would work, other than somehow recording a weak signal onto the disc? I must research.
It's nice to see the Self-Erasing VHS video is over 300K views. I think Hackaday did an article on it.
Yes it’s really helped out. It’s all about the subject. When Sebastiaan suggested this, he mentioned that there were no other videos on the subject, which is always a good thing.
You should include a link to your video about V-Lite, because according to Fran Blanche's latest video, it seems that some people are confusing this self-erasing VHS tape with a disposable VHS tape, like V-Lite.
OK, will do
I'm obviously very late on this; enjoyable video. I remember viewing 'Coyote Ugly' at the time of release and all I remember was eyeroll Olympics and women acting the fool in a bar. I don't recall a plot of any kind. I noticed your anamorphic widescreen thumbnail. Take care 🤍
I was a tad concerned when I didn’t see your comment on this one as you’re usually very early. Glad to see you’re fine. The widescreen thumb is a bit of a cheat, I grabbed a still from the video but then needed to shrink it to leave room for the text, so I ended up adding letterbox bars to hide the fact the image no longer filled the vertical frame.
This video got posted to Metafilter today (as “This Tape Will Self-Destruct in 12,120 Seconds”) so there’s a chance it’s going to escape the regular viewers. (The defeated by a paper clip thumbnail I think is helping.) Ewen
It could do with the help, the video didn’t do as well as I hoped it would. I’d hoped the subject would make it appeal to a wider audience than usual.
As always, I love the way you tell a story, Mat. Of course never heard of this format and very fascinated to see how it worked.
Can't have been easy for video rental stores, baised on the average store here in the UK, they kept about 4-6 tapes of most films, which got re-circulated, they'd have had to keep alot more copys of each film at the store if they didnt get the tapes returned. I wonder if the ones that did'nt get used got returned and re-used with another film?
I would guess this was aimed more at retail outlets like Woolworths. A major factor in their bankruptcy was that they had become increasing reliant on media sales, even as a distributor to other stores. Very profitable until Spotify and Netflix went online.
Oh good, I made a guess as to how it worked and I was depressingly right. It’s a bit late now, but at the beginning when you’re describing the tape, it’s a bit disconcerting when your mouth is behind the tape. Maybe something to note for the future.
It wasn’t intentional, on-camera monitor screens and varifocal spectacles don’t mix. I’m pretty much shooting blind when I’m talking to camera.
I appreciated the supercut of the screams LOL Super interesting tech!
I suspect a supercut of all the screams in the movie would be half and hour long. There’s something about watching fake fun that makes me even grumpier. Fortunately the tech made up for it.
Great video. Cool to see the workings of it. Thanks for sharing.
Just a thought: maybe "2View: The self-erasing VHS tape hacked with a paperclip" would be a better title, so that if people ever search for 2View they'll find the video? Anyway, I'm no Youtube search engine expert :)
I think you did hit the right point about failing. If this had come out in -91 then sure I think it might have taken off. Even more so if earlier. But yeah -01 VHS was going out fast. If I remember correctly, at my local movie rental, all new movies were only on DVD.
That is fascinating - really well presented, Mat. I remember when movies first became available on video tape, it was theoretically possible to buy one, but the price (in the early 1980s) was about £75 for a recent top movie, so if this 'twice view' product had come out then, it might have found a place at a more premium price, competing in the 'buy to own' market instead of the rental market. It might not have been too hard for the designers to defeat the 'paperclip hack' with some local case strengthening if the product had been a goer. But, timing is everything - as Elisha Gray found out when Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone shortly before him... Great work, as always, Mat!
Yeah, there was that strange 10 year+ gap when VHS was priced for rental houses and nothing less, while LD was actually cheaper since (I assume?) a installed player base (ie rental market potential) failed to emerge. "First Sale Doctrine" in America meant there could be no market bifurcation - any legal copy could get turned around and rented out for profit - but I don't know how common that legal framework is around the world. Japan allows limits on what can/cannot be rented, so there are generally two different releases on each title (probably to create price tiers) and the rental version sometimes lacks commentaries and other supplements. At some point this changed, and I don't know what convinced the studios to change practice to market VHS at "sell-through" prices, but I remember Home Alone and Pulp Fiction a few years later as massive home video campaigns (even though I was able to buy an import Japanese LD of Pulp Fiction at Suncoast video a full year before the sell-through VHS dropped, the theatrical window was something else back then). Had 2View (3View, 4View?) emerged in about 1985, it would have changed the course of home media for certain.
Great video you made of it Mat. I enjoyed it very much. I myself had not yet seen in real life how this exactly worked, but you showed it very clearly. I'm glad I could contribute to your channel in this way!
I'm so glad you sent it over. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to open it without destroying the mechanism, either that or not be able to figure out exactly how it worked. As it was, it all turned out as good as I could have hoped. So thanks again - it's very much appreciated.
I have a Japanese friend in his sixties who recommends that film (insists it is his favorite), but by those clips I am starting to wonder if he was the target demographic. Speaking of convenience-as-achilles-heel, when Japan started their digital satellite service about twenty years ago instead of accepting the minor hassle of relaying ones tuner card serial number to the provider they initiated a two week sampling period by inserting the included card (required to decode even free to air local channels) and tuning your new HDTV to any of the BS/CS subscription channels. Of course in order for that to be possible every card had decryption keys on hand which *had to be static* so that future purchasers could also participate. Cut to somebody figuring out you could use an off-the-shelf IC card writer to set your "two week" expiration date up to the year 2038 and... BS got real!
Your failed format videos are among my favourites! Did you remove a word of dialogue at 5:15? I can't make up my mind if there's an edit there or if I'm losing my mind 😅
Yes I accidentally said ‘machine’ as it’s a word I use a lot when describing mechanisms, but it didn’t really fit here.
I wonder if this inspired the creation of FlexPlay, the DVD format introduced in 2003 that self-destructed after 48 hours (unless you kept it in your freezer).
One article at the time did mention that ‘they’ were working on a self erasing DVD, so it’s possibly something to do with the same company.
It looks almost as bad as the film Honey, from around the same time, which I declare the worst film I've ever seen. Now you come to mention it, I can't recall if I bought any new videotapes after DVD came in. Though from having a single tape left in 2016, I've now got a wall full again, thanks to this retro format lark!
The best thing about this format is it made for a perfect Techmoan video! This had better get some serious views! Thanks Sebastian!
It's all in the lap of the gods now, I tried my best, but that rarely guarantees success...we'll see.
Thinking about my own use of video tape back in the 1990s, I have to agree with Mat that this would been a pretty attractive product if the price-point was low enough to be worth the purchase. I very rarely ever bought sell-through VHS. I would say at least 95% were rentals. Me and my friends spent a lot of time at Blockbuster from the late 80s onward. But we also bought a lot of blank tape. We seemed to record EVERYTHING, like hours off MTV, or entire seasons of Star Trek, Seinfeld, etc. So to have some rubbish movie that magically became a blank tape would have been most welcome! The only annoyance being that you might not want even watch it TWICE! Thinking back, I don't remember ever renting DVDs. I think was must have been an interval between the end of my VHS use and having a DVR in my life. That maybe we why I missed so much TV in the early aughts. Nothing was recorded!
Really cool! Never saw one my own country.. I kind of like Coyote Ugly though 😅 I had also already switched to DVD in 1997.. It was a bit dumb to release this in the Netherlands. Piracy was rampant and this would have been like something red on a bull 😂 It was probably cracked within a week.. Cool mechanism though! Quite clever..
The idea as such was terrible, but I can only applaud the ingenuity that went into this product. Then again, compared to today, you at least had some control over when to watch a video. With streaming services, content tends to pop in and out of existence at a random pace. You did a good job with the editing. The video looks really well rounded.
Thanks, this was very interesting. Never heard about it in France. This would never have worked, since the security device is in the user's hands. Even if it existed before the Internet was a thing, people would have known. Example, our French Canal+ decoders, our first encrypted channel in 1984. DIYing a decoder was possible. Nowadays, the un-encryption is done on the server side for all subscription channels.
When TV cards for the PC became a thing in the late 90s, a whole plethora of tools appeared to bypass the encryption. Even the then-advanced Nagravision with its randomly permuted lines was easily defeated just by rearranging the lines depending on their similarity. This worked surprisingly well...or so I've heard ;)
What an idea! Clever as h*ll, but easily defeated, thanks for the video!
What a great video. I love all your videos that show an analogue version of what today would be a digital code or algorithm.
Thank you Sebastian. I do admire the engineering solution to the fixed watches then wipe.
I'd never heard of this! What a weird niche tech, and a great video
I remember these.
Ah so this was basically an analog precursor to the very short-lived DIVX format.
Oddly enough DIVX had already been and gone a couple of years before this was launched.
I have an Oasis cd at home that had the same principle. Once you listened to it twice it then wiped itself clean and couldn't be used again..I actually don't think I ever listened it out of fear of losing it..it's ok though I just bought the full album when it released 😂
I like the ingeniousity of the mechanism, but from the beginning on, it was already clear to me that there must have been some way to circumvent it, easier than the discolouring of the "rental" DVD movies that Alec (Technology Connections) once showed... At least, the tape is still usable afterwards, and not just "waste"...
I'm curious where the paperclip interacted with the mechanism. Did it stop the magnet reaching the tape or did it force the magnet to switch to the final "safe" position while the spool was clear? Would be good to see that in the video, though I appreciate that it would be more work on an already excellent video just to slake a nerd's curiosity!
Trust me, twice is the absolute limit of how many times I would ever want to watch Coyote Ugly. I think that is indeed the total number of times I've seen it. Still, it's a clever idea and if it had launched in the 80s or 90s it would have seen success, and I like that you get to reuse the tape afterwards! There was a DVD version of this idea in the US in the late 2000s, only it used a chemical reaction to "erase" the DVD after a few days, and then you would have to discard it, so a very wasteful format. People figured out of course you could stick the DVD in the freezer and it would last a bit longer, or just rip the thing.
Yep that's the video I was thinking of too. I actually bought a FlexPlay DVD when they were new purely to experiment with making it last longer. I think they lasted a couple of weeks in the fridge.
Sounds like something a fancy VHS killer like Jigsaw would setup.
Thank you for continuing to do what you do!
Very interesting format! I wonder about something. Had this format come about 10 years earlier, might it have been a success?
I’m not sure there would ever have been sufficient space in the price bands for it to have found a niche. Even if it had come out a decade earlier in the early 90’s - from my (faulty) memory a rental was £2, a blank tape was £4 and a pre-recorded sell though title was £11. If I’m recalling that correctly then 2View would have to be marketed at around £6 to make any sense. I suspect it would cost a bit more to manufacturer than a regular blank cassette but I don’t know what cut the movie studios would have needed. It’s possible there wouldn’t be a price point left where this worked.
I assume the paperclip held the magnet arm to stop it swinging round and hitting the tape after it had done the 2 plays.
I'll be uploading a version with the defeat demonstrated shortly.
I like the mechanism nice innovation but always going to get bypassed plus of course timing
Excellent and interesting video, thanks. Great to end it with that clear section showing the mechanism.
As soon as you know it's a mechanism the challenge is to defeat it. If you just opened the tape the magnet wouldn't automatically release? that seems like a slightly weak approach. It doesn't matter if you wreck the casing if you can just transplant the reels into another casing for a worn out tape.
Strong agree on your conclusion. Probably terrible timimg, and kiina similar to that dvd that ages to unreadable on exposure to oxygen. The mechanism in the tape is absolutely clever though.
Intriguing technology. And speaking of Technology and its Connections, it’s reminiscent of Alec’s video on the Flexplay DVD, except with the 2View system it will still work as designed over 20 years later being based on ingenious mechanical system to limit the views rather than Flexplay’s reliance on some sort of oxidation reaction to “kill” the disk and render it into another bit of plastic trash. By the way, those clips you included that featured the screaming nature of the film looked too good to be from a 20-year-old VHS, so I assume you actually had to go a buy a DVD copy of a film that you didn’t like in the first place in order to include them.
Those are all composite captures from this tape.
Quite a clever mechanism, very interesting indeed. Presumably these tapes also had Macrovision since an initial thought might have been to copy the movie across before watching - if it was one worth viewing multiple times, of course!
Yes it’s just a normal tape, with a brief watermark, in a weird case.
Of course, coming from the US, I never heard of it. I remember the DVD equivalent. I'm surprised this got as far as testing it. A typical excellent video, Matt. Cheers.
At least with this format you were left with something more useful than a coaster.
In Dutch the word for ‘tape’ and ‘tire’ (and ‘band’) is indeed the same: ‘band’.
I am from Holland, and while watching, it got back to me. Indeed, quite absurd they launched it when they did. Also illegal movie downloads, divx format and such, ‘came in to view’ at that time. Always highly appreciate the audio or video format video’s 😃😃
I am also originally from the Netherlands, I never heard of this system though. At the time it was launched, DVD was really coming, but also illegal downloading was already a "serious business"