I'm not sure if it's really a You question given it's broadcast you care most about but: do you have any ideas or Opinions about how big camcorders really were? Like for people, how many people actually used them actively and made neighbours and friends suffer their children existing or badly shot holiday flicks? And how much was just like, companies trying to make fetch happen and marketing heavily. I never felt like I saw camcorders except for school, but maybe this is an australia thing
i'm glad you asked if I have any ideas or opinions because I definitely have no facts on this. my feeling on it is this: everyone owned a camcorder here, everyone used it constantly, and nobody watched the results.
Camcorders were so heavily marketed, and there are so many on the used market. They sold easily tens of millions, and I could believe hundreds. If you put a pin in like 1994, I bet there were at least 30 different models being sold simultaneously. This was definitely marketed hard, but you have to remember that these were being sold from the mid 70s, continuously. By the 80s, if you watched a movie and a Parent said "oh no, we forgot the camcorder, we HAVE to go back for it" - I really, firmly believe that was reflecting the cultural reality.
My family had a camcorder. Other households I visited as a child had them. I've found plenty in other peoples houses, stuffed in closets. I think that by the late 80s/early 90s, virtually everyone from the lower middle class up owned one.
Now: How much were they shooting? That is a much more intriguing question.
I wouldn't say that I've collected an enormous number of VHS / Hi8 / etc. tapes in my life, but... that makes part of the statement on its own, actually. It's far more common to come across a camcorder than to come across any used tapes. Maybe people are just more careful with them, but I doubt that. People of all ages throw out whole computers with untouched hard drives, without even the slightest effort to protect their privacy. I doubt that they look at a box of unlabeled VHS tapes they haven't thought about in decades and go "no, we have to keep those, even though we're throwing out the camcorder and VCR." Maybe, but... I don't think so. So perhaps there are just simply not that many tapes.
Of those I have obtained, the overwhelming majority were VHS, and almost all of those were recordings of TV shows and movies. That was the original point of VHS and IME/IMO, it remained the primary use case until the bitter end.
When I find 8mm/DV tapes, they are exactly what you'd expect: School plays, house parties, birthday parties for small children, soccer matches, etc. And my tendency has always been to imagine that America shot hundreds of millions of miles of tape of these events, and that all of it was utterly wasted.
My personal belief has long been that the camcorder is one of the most remarkable hoaxes ever perpetrated on the public; the idea that you will go and shoot footage of anything and then want to watch it later is laughable. House parties are not fun on tape; what was funny when someone said it at 9PM is not funny in the cold light of day. You can barely even make it out, in fact, because microphones are so much worse than human ears.
The same is true for the ubiquitous school play: as eardum-rending as those are in person, they are raw static when recorded into a pinhole electret mic with automatic gain control in an echo chamber auditorium. You hear more of the coughing audience and the tape mechanism and dad's fingers rustling on the plastic of the camera than you do the performance.
After the initial novelty, the first few attempts to watch what they'd recorded, people had to have quietly, sheepishly realized how absolutely unwatchable Home Movies actually are. I think that Americans bought tens of millions of VHS-C and 8mm tapes, shot them, and then put them in a box where they never so much as got rewound. But that didn't stop anyone from shooting those tapes.
I think that the camcorder was a hoax, but not a fraud, because:
it gave Dad something to do.
It gave Men, largely, a way to be a part of something they were not in fact contributing to, an Important Role to serve in virtually every activity: Dave will bring the camcorder. The creation of the tapes was the point; watching them wasn't just disappointing, it wasn't even necessary.
This is all pure armchair psychology, I have no proof of it except my observations of human nature: After the first couple clearly-disastrous Screenings, the prototypical Dad would not have wanted to expose himself to more humiliation, so yeah, I doubt the tapes ever really did much after they got taken out of the camcorder.
