Cartrivision

Cartrivision was an analog videocassette format introduced in 1972, and the first format to offer feature films for consumer rental. It was produced by Frank Stanton's 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. Cartrivision recorders and sets were manufactured by Avco, a company that CTI partnered with to manufacture and develop the format, as well as Admiral, Packard Bell, Emerson, Montgomery Ward, and Sears, the latter two marketing Cartrivision sets under their own brand names in their stores. While Montgomery Ward's TV used the Admiral chassis, as did all Montgomery Wards Airline TVs, Admiral marketed their own Cartrivision with a different chassis.

The first model of Cartrivision-equipped TV set sold for US $1,350 (equivalent to $7,196 in 2016), 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 magnetic 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.