Almost half a century ago, if you had enough disposable income and a certain amount of technical agility, you could have your own YouTube channel. Sort of. You could share your videos with friends who came over to your place to watch them, or you lend them to pals who had hardware similar to yours.

Sony introduced the Portapak, a 20-pound camera-video recorder pairing, in the late ’60s. The music journalist Lisa Robinson and her husband, Richard Robinson, a writer and record producer, were among the first Manhattanites to adopt the technology. “We schlepped that damn thing everywhere,” Ms. Robinson recollected. They taped live shows and their own parties — “we recorded Lou Reed and the rock critic Richard Meltzer doing an acoustic version of ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ at our house.” When Sony introduced the Betamax VCR the next decade, they taped television shows and showed their tapes to friends on an early projection TV.

The Betamax format compelled a micro approach: early cassettes could record only an hour’s worth of material. Once the Sony rival JVC introduced the VHS format, which could record two hours on a single cassette, and subsequent refinements yielded variable recording speeds, the idea of Hollywood movies on home video became a practical reality.

Movies on home video created a new and highly lucrative revenue stream for Hollywood. But as I learned in the mid-1980s when I worked at the consumer electronics magazine Video Review, as much money as home video made, the movie industry always hated it. The idea of consumers actually owning motion pictures was anathema to them. This never changed; as the DVD format took off in the 1990s, I remember one conversation with an insider, who said, “Hollywood can’t wait to stop making little aluminum discs.” Nobody, in my experience, would ever speak of this on the record. Indeed, beating the bushes to even get a home video executive to do so now, I came up with nothing.