Trade

In this system, the material that constitutes the money itself had very little intrinsic value, but none the less such money achieves significant market value through being scarce as an artifact.
. The system of commodity money in many instances evolved into a system of representative money. However, Tivos and DVRs are the main competitors with the VHS in home recording. Ancient Sparta minted coins from iron to discourage its citizens from engaging in foreign trade. It can also be more convenient to use VHS tapes because they can be rewritten easily, and VCRs can be easier than DVD recorders to use. Numismatists have examples of coins from the earliest large-scale societies, although these were initially unmarked lumps of precious metal^[2]. Despite DVD's better quality, however, VHS is still widely used in home recording of television programs, due to the large installed base and the lower cost of VHS recorders.

This first stage of currency, where metals were used to represent stored value, and symbols to represent commodities, formed the basis of trade in the Fertile Crescent for over 1500 years. Commentators predict that 2006 will be the final year of new releases on VHS, as major studios continue to phase out VHS. Currency was introduced as a standardized money to facilitate a wider exchange of goods and services. Moreover, most television programs released as box sets are for sale in DVD format only. [1]. Many films released to theaters from 2004 onwards have later been released only on DVD and not on VHS, and many other new feature films are being released solely on DVD. In Mexico under Montezuma cocoa beans were money. retailers Circuit City and Best Buy stopped selling VHS tapes in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

In medieval Iraq, bread was used as an early form of money. Major U.S. This is called commodity money and includes any commonly-available commodity that has intrinsic value; historical examples include pigs, rare seashells, whale's teeth, and (often) cattle. The DVD format was introduced in 1997 and has since overtaken VHS in sales and rentals. The first instances of money were objects with intrinsic value. In addition, it offers superior audiovisual quality, and the storage of data in digital format on tape makes for improved transfer and editing. Main article: History of money. MiniDV has largely replaced 8mm tapes as the de facto camcorder standard in more recent years as it is smaller still (some MiniDV camcorders being no larger than one's hand).

Free trade advanced further in the late 20th century and early 2000s:. 8mm tapes, introduced in the early 1980s, succeeded as a format for camcorders (both in the consumer, and to an extent, professional market), as VHS and Betamax camcorders were unsuitably large and heavy in comparison. In 1947, 23 countries agreed to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to promote free trade. As these cassettes are much more compact in design — which also means the hardware to play and record the tapes has to be more compact than VHS, and therefore more expensive — they are much more suited to portable applications such as camcorders. These organizations became operational in 1946 after enough countries ratified the agreement. Other formats such as 8mm video cassettes and MiniDV have emerged since, but these formats are by no means in complete competition with VHS. It set up rules and institutions to regulate the international political economy: the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later divided into the World Bank and Bank for International Settlements). Netscape.

During the war, in 1944, 44 countries signed the Bretton Woods Agreement, intended to prevent national trade barriers, to avoid depressions. Windows and Microsoft vs. The lack of free trade was considered by many as a principal cause of the depression, and World War II. IBM, Macintosh vs. During this period, there was a great drop in trade and other economic indicators. The format war and the "marketing over technology" claims have taken on a life of their own, and have been used as analogies in the battles of the computer industry, including Apple vs. The Great Depression was a major economic recession that ran from 1929 to 1941. Sony ultimately conceded the fight in the late '80s, bringing out a line of VHS VCRs.

This became the policy in many countries attempting to industrialize and out-compete English exporters. Ultimately Betamax did manage to make up some of the difference on recording time, but this was too little, too late. This was followed within a few years by the infant industry scenario developed by Mill anticipated New Trade Theory by promoting the theory that government had the "duty" to protect young industries, although only for a time necessary for them to develop full capacity. The longer tape time is sometimes cited as the defining factor in the format war, as the longer VHS tapes allowed consumers to record entire programs unattended, and arguably created the entire video rental industry by providing sufficient playing time for most feature films to be distributed on a single cassette. This was taken as evidence against the universal doctrine of free trade, as it was believed that more of the economic surplus of trade would accrue to a country following reciprocal, rather than completely free, trade policies. Betamax held an early lead in the format war, offering some technical advantages, but by 1980 VHS was gaining due to its longer tape time (3 hours maximum, compared to just 60 minutes for Betamax) and JVC's less strict licensing program. Ricardo and others had suggested this earlier. In fact, however, the root causes of VHS' victory are somewhat more complex.

John Stuart Mill proved that a country with monopoly pricing power on the international market could manipulate the terms of trade through maintaining tariffs, and that the response to this might be reciprocity in trade policy. Since Betamax was widely perceived at the time as the better format, it is often stated that VHS' eventual victory was a victory of marketing over technical excellence. That is, the calculation made was whether it was in any particular country's self-interest to open its borders to imports. As mentioned, VHS was the winner of a protracted and somewhat bitter format war during the early 1980s against Sony's Betamax format. The ascendancy of free trade was primarily based on national advantage in the mid 19th century. Conversely, an E-300 tape runs for 300 minutes in PAL-SP, but 200 minutes in NTSC-SP. In Principles of Political Economy and Taxation Ricardo advanced the doctrine still considered the most counterintuitive in economics:. For example, a T-120 tape runs for 120 minutes in NTSC-SP, but 180 minutes in PAL-SP.

In 1817, David Ricardo, James Mill and Robert Torrens showed that free trade might benefit the industrially weak as well as the strong, in the famous theory of comparative advantage. It can easily be derived by multiplying with 3/2 or 2/3, respectively. In 1799, the Dutch East India Company, formerly the world's largest company, became bankrupt, partly due to the rise of competitive free trade. It is perfectly possible to record and play back a blank T-XXX tape in a PAL machine or a blank E-XXX tape in an NTSC machine, but the resulting playing time will be different than indicated. Smith said that he considered all rationalizations of import and export controls "dupery", which hurt the trading nation at the expense of specific industries. In order to avoid confusion, manufacturers indicate the playing time in minutes that can be expected for the market the tape is sold in:. Since the division of labour was restricted by the size of the market, he said that countries having access to larger markets would be able to divide labour more efficiently and thereby become more productive. Both NTSC and PAL/SECAM VHS cassettes are physically identical (although the signals recorded on the tape are incompatible.) However, as tape speeds differ between NTSC and PAL/SECAM, the playing time for any given cassette will vary accordingly between the systems.

It criticised Mercantilism, and argued that economic specialization could benefit nations just as much as firms. Likewise, S-VHS machines for the Brazilian market record in NTSC and convert to/from PAL-M. In 1776, Adam Smith published the paper An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. S-VHS machines sold in SECAM markets record internally in PAL, and convert to/from SECAM during record/playback, respectively. Trade in the East Indies was dominated by Portugal in the 16th century, the Netherlands in the 17th century, and the British in the 18th century. S-VHS only exists in PAL/625/25 and NTSC/525/30. In the 16th century, Holland was the centre of free trade, imposing no exchange controls, and advocating the free movement of goods. Dedicated multistandard machines can usually handle all standards listed, some high end model can even convert a tape from one standard to another by using a built-in standards converter.

Spices brought to Europe from distant lands were some of the most valuable commodities for their weight, sometimes rivaling gold. regular VHS machines sold in Europe nowadays can typically handle PAL, MESECAM for record and playback, plus NTSC for playback only. The spice trade was of major economic importance and helped spur the Age of Exploration. E.g. Vasco da Gama started the Spice trade in 1498. These can handle VHS tapes of more than one standards. The Hanseatic League was an alliance of trading cities that maintained a trade monopoly over most of Northern Europe and the Baltic, between the 13th and 17th centuries. Since the 1990s dual- and multistandard VHS machines have become more and more common.

Vikings sailed to Western Europe, while Varangians to Russia. The following signal varieties exist in conventional VHS:. From the 8th to the 11th century, the Vikings and Varangians traded as they sailed from and to Scandinavia. Typically, a VHS machine can only handle signals of the country it was sold in. For instance, Radhanites were a medieval guild or group (the precise meaning of the word is lost to history) of Jewish merchants who traded between the Christians in Europe and the Muslims of the Near East. However, a machine must be designed to record a given standard. Nevertheless some trade did occur. VHS can record and play back all varieties of analogue television signals in existence at the time VHS was devised.

The fall of the Roman empire, and the succeeding Dark Ages brought instability to Western Europe and a near collapse of the trade network. This format is most notably used by Fox for some of its cable networks. Their widespread empire produced a stable and secure transportation network that enabled the shipment of trade goods without fear of significant piracy. This format is the least expensive format to support a pre-read edit. Roman commerce allowed their empire to flourish and endure. There is also a JVC-designed component digital professional production format known as Digital-S or (officially) D9 that uses a VHS form factor tape and essentially the same mechanical tape handling techniques as an S-VHS recorder. From the beginning of Greek civilization until the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century, a financially lucrative trade brought valuable spice to Europe from the far east, including China. This development hampered the sales of the Betamax system somewhat, because the Betamax cassette geometry prevented a similar development.

For this purpose they established trade colonies the Greeks called emporia. The magnetic tape on VHS-C cassettes is wound on one main spool and uses a gear wheel to advance the tape; the wheel and spool can also be moved by hand. The Phoenicians were noted sea traders, travelling across the Mediterranean Sea, and as far north as Britain for sources of tin to manufacture bronze. Since VHS-C tapes are based on the same magnetic tape as full size tapes, they can be played back in standard VHS players using a mechanical adapter, without the need of any kind of signal conversion. Long-range trade routes first appeared in the 3rd millennium BCE, when Sumerians in Mesopotamia traded with the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley. Another variant is VHS-C (C for compact), used in some camcorders. Materials used for creating jewelry were traded with Egypt since 3000 BCE. W-VHS caters for high definition video.

There is evidence of the exchange of obsidian and flint during the stone age. Devices have also been invented which directly connect a personal computer to VHS tape recorders for use as a data backup device. Trade is believed to have taken place throughout much of recorded human history. Several improved versions of VHS exist, most notably S-VHS, an improved analog standard, and D-VHS, which records digital video onto a VHS form factor tape. Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.^[1]. There was a time when higher-end VCRs provided functions for manually removing and adding these index marks — so that, for example, they coincide with the actual start of the program — but this feature has become hard to find in recent models. Trading was the main facility of prehistoric people, who bartered goods and services from each other. These are normally written at the beginning of each recording session, and can be found using the VCR's index search function: this will fast-wind forward or backward to the nth specified index mark, and resume playback from there.

Trade originated with the start of communication in prehistoric time. The control track can additionally hold index marks. . Since good tracking depends on the exact distance between the rotating drum and the fixed control/audio head reading the linear tracks, which usually varies by a couple of micrometers between machines due to manufacturing tolerances, most VCRs offer tracking adjustment, either manual or automatic, to correct such mismatches. As such, trade at market prices between locations benefits both locations. Another linear control track, at the tape's lower edge, holds pulses that mark the beginning of every frame of video; these are used to fine-tune the tape speed during playback and to get the rotating heads exactly on their helical tracks rather than having them end up somewhere between two adjacent tracks (a feature called tracking). Trade exists between regions because different regions have a comparative advantage in the production of some tradable commodity, or because different regions' size allows for the benefits of mass production. These advanced features are impossible to find on later-model VCRs due to the rise of digital video formats.

Due to specialization and division of labor, most people concentrate on a small aspect of production, trading for other products. Another high-end feature was manual audio level control, which made the VHS HiFi format much more useful for high-quality audio-only recording purposes as discussed above. Trade exists for many reasons. (Due to the different ways in which linear and HiFi audio are recorded, these kinds of dubbing were not possible with the HiFi tracks). Trade between two traders is called bilateral trade, while trade between more than two traders is called multilateral trade. Without the dubbing features, this task would've required the tape to be copied to another tape which would cause generational loss. The invention of money (and later credit, paper money and non-physical money) greatly simplified and promoted trade. This was useful, for example, for laying a song over a previously edited-together montage of short video clips that were the same total duration as that song.

As a result, buying can be separated from selling, or earning. These would move the tape past the heads and keep the video unchanged while recording new linear audio or keep the linear audio unchanged while recording new video, respectively. Modern traders instead generally negotiate through a medium of exchange, such as money. Some higher-end VHS and S-VHS VCRs once offered "audio dubbing" and "video dubbing" functions. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. Of course, for backward compatibility, hi-fi VCRs still write the linear audio track during recording, and can automatically read it during playback if the hi-fi audio is not present. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The excellent sound quality of hi-fi VHS has gained it some popularity as an audio format in certain applications; in particular, ordinary home hi-fi VCRs are sometimes used by home recording enthusiasts as a handy and inexpensive medium for making high-quality stereo mixdowns and master recordings from multitrack audio tape.

Trade is also called commerce. When the video signal is written by the following video head, it erases and overwrites the audio signal at the surface of the tape, but leaves the deeper portion of the signal undisturbed. Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both. These audio tracks take advantage of depth multiplexing: since they use lower frequencies than the video, their magnetization signals penetrate deeper into the tape. As of mid-2005, there is a proposal for a Central American Free Trade Agreement, which would also include the United States and the Dominican Republic. More recent hi-fi VCRs add higher-quality stereo audio tracks which are read and written by heads located on the same spinning drum that carries the video heads, frequency modulated to the unused frequency range in between the chroma and luma signals. January 1, 1995 World Trade Organization was created to facilitate free trade, by mandating mutual most favoured nation trading status between all signatories. In the original VHS format, audio was recorded unmodulated in a single (monaural) linear track at the upper edge of the tape, which was limited in frequency response by the tape speed.

1994 The GATT Marrakech Agreement specified formation of the WTO. The video bandwidth is achieved with a relatively low tape speed by the use of helical scan recording of a frequency modulated luminance (black and white) signal, to which a frequency-reduced "color under" chroma (hue and saturation) signal is added. January 1, 1994 NAFTA took effect. The vertical resolution of VHS (and all other analog recording methods) is determined by the TV standard — a maximum of 486 lines are visible in NTSC and a maximum of 576 lines in PAL. 1992 European Union lifted barriers to internal trade in goods and labour. The frequency modulation of the luminance signal makes higher resolutions impossible within the VHS standard, no matter how advanced the recorder's technology. VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth, and a horizontal resolution of about 240 discernible lines per scanline [1].

An unofficial LP mode with half the standard speed exists on some NTSC machines, but is not part of the VHS standard. Because of this, commercial prerecorded tapes were almost always recorded in SP mode. Of course, these speed reductions cause corresponding reductions in video quality; also, tapes recorded at the lower speed often exhibit poor playback performance on recorders other than the one they were produced on. More recent machines usually allow the selection of longer recording times by lowering the tape speed: LP mode (for PAL and some NTSC machines) halves the tape speed and doubles the recording time, while EP mode (for NTSC and some newer PAL machines, aka SLP mode) drops the tape speed to one-third, for triple the recording time.

Most cassettes have lower recording times because they use thicker tape, which helps avoid jams; careful users generally avoid the thinnest tapes. A cassette holds a maximum of about 430 m of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at "standard" (SP) quality. The tape speed is 3.335 cm/s for NTSC, 2.339 cm/s for PAL. A VHS cassette contains a ½ inch (12.7 mm) wide magnetic tape wound between two spools, allowing it to be slowly passed over the various playback and recording heads of the video cassette recorder.

. Most newer VHS machines do not perform this unthreading step, as due to improved engineering, head-tape contact is no longer an impediment to fast winding. Early VHS machines could rewind and fast forward the tape considerably faster than a Betamax VCR since they unthreaded the tape from the playback heads before commencing any high-speed winding. VHS initially offered a longer playing time than the Betamax system, and it also had the advantage of a far less complex tape transport mechanism.

VHS became a standard format for consumer recording and viewing in the 1980s and 1990s after competing in a fierce format war with Sony's Betamax and, to a lesser extent, Philips' Video 2000. Some early reports claim the name originally stood for Victor Helical Scan System. VHS officially stands for Video Home System, but it initially stood for Vertical Helical Scan, after the relative head/tape scan technique. The Video Home System, first released in September 1976, better known by its abbreviation VHS, is a recording and playing standard for video cassette recorders (VCRs), developed by JVC (with some of its critical technology under lucrative licensing agreements with Sony) and launched in 1976.

Viz Video (1993-). Buena Vista Home Entertainment (1989-). Miramax Home Entertainment, a unit of Buena Vista Home Entertainment (1989-). New Line Home Entertainment, a TimeWarner Company (1989-).

Carolco Home Video, a division of Artisan Entertainment, a Lions Gate Company (1988-1995). Orion Home Video, a Sony Pictures Entertainment Company (1988-1997). Anchor Bay Entertainment (1980s-). Hi-Tops Video, a Heron Communications Company (1985-1992).

Simitar Entertainment (1980s-1990s). Touchstone Home Entertainment, a unit of the Walt Disney Company (1984-). Artisan Entertainment, a Lions Gate Company (1984-). Family Home Entertainment, a division of Artisan Entertainment, a Lions Gate Company (1982-).

NBC Home Video, an NBC/Universal Company (1981-). Universal Studios Home Video, an NBC/Universal Company (1980-). Magnetic Video, the first duplicator/distributor of movies on video cassette for home use (1977-1981). Vestron Video, a division of Artisan Entertainment, a Lions Gate Company (1979-).

MGM Home Entertainment, a Sony Pictures Entertainment Company (1979-). Media Home Entertainment, a Heron Communications Company (1978-1992). Warner Home Video, a TimeWarner Company (1978-). HBO Video, a TimeWarner Company (1978-).

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (1978-). Walt Disney Home Entertainment (1978-). Twentieth (20th) Century-Fox Home Entertainment, a News Corporation Company (1977-). Paramount Home Video, a Viacom Company (1976-).

E-XXX indicates playing time for PAL or SECAM in SP speed. T-XXX indicates playing time for NTSC or PAL-M in SP speed. PAL-M, Brazil). PAL/525/30 (i.e.

NTSC/525/30 (Most parts of North and South America, Japan, South Korea). MESECAM/625/25 (most other SECAM countries, notably Eastern Europe and Middle East). SECAM/625/25 (SECAM, French variety). PAL/625/25 (most of Western Europe, many parts of Asia and Africa).