| has gloss | eng: Cartrivision was a videocassette format introduced in 1972, and the first format to offer feature films for consumer rental. It was produced by Frank Stantons Cartridge Television, Inc. (CTI), a subsidiary of Avco, who also owned Embassy Pictures at the time. Cartrivision was available in the form of a TV set with a built-in recorder for the format. (about $6600 in 2008 dollars), and was the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies available for rent. Like Philips VCR format (introduced at the same time in Europe), the square Cartrivision cassette had the two reels of half-inch tape mounted on top of each other, but it could record up to 114 minutes. It did so using a crude "skip-field" form of video compression that recorded only every third video field and played it back three times. |