Record/Film/Book/Interactive TV

Abstract

Although home video scholars often position the EVR (CBS’s Electronic Video Recording) as a failure, I argue that it is best understood as a threshold format that articulated new possibilities for television by linking it to existing but divergent technologies and practices: the phonograph, film cartridges, print, and interactivity. As developed through original document research built from the Motorola archives, newspapers, biographies, promotional materials, and a range of trade journals, I show how the EVR contributed to ongoing negotiations over the meaning of television and demonstrate the value of threshold format as an analytic lens attuned to formats that boast little or no material existence but which occupy pivotal positions within ongoing experiments into how “old” technologies can be refigured to offer new possibilities and opportunities. Whereas successfully standardized formats tend to obscure the possibilities that came before them, attending to threshold formats redirects our attention to forgotten ambitions and potentials.