Video

“Have you seen this video?” my friend asked as he held up one of those VHS tape covers you’d commonly find at video rental stores like this one.

It was the late 80s, and watching a video was one of the main rituals for us young teenage kids. Every Friday, we’d head up to the video store and pick up two or three older titles for 99 cents each. As long as rewound the VHS tapes and brought them back in by Sunday night, we were golden.

This little trip down memory lane got me thinking about how the word video has changed so much over my lifetime.

First, let’s travel back a couple thousand years, as one does.

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“Video!” proclaimed the ancient Roman senator.

Wait, what’s an ancient Roman doing using such a modern word? It turns out that “video” means “I see” in Latin. “Videre”—“to see”—became vedere in Italian, voir in French, and ver in Spanish and Portuguese.

“Video” in English remained very rare until the early 20th century, when inventors and scientists were working with a new invention called television. By the 1920s, there was a process for transmitting TV signals that split it up into two channels: one for sight, and one for sound.

The term “audio” was already in common use, largely thanks to radio. Naturally, another Latin word would be considered, and since “audio” means “I hear” or “I listen”, video was a natural counterpart.

By the 1950s, people began referring to the signal for television as “video signal”, even though it had both an audio and a video component. It was just simpler to say “video” when you meant television, and “audio” when you meant a sound-only channel.

By the 1970s, the term was familiar enough so that, when an incredible new product that could record and play back something you had seen on TV, manufacturers immediately began labeling these tapes as “video tapes” or “video cassettes.”

Soon after this use of video caught on, video games took the world by storm. At least, they took the malls by storm, and that was a pretty big slice of my little world. You can read a little about the rise of video games here if you’d like:

While the use of the phrase “video games” spread, so did another incredibly common use of the word: watching a music video on MTV. Gradually, the “music” part was dropped, and “watching a video” meant a produced music video.

Here’s the first video ever to air on MTV (appropriate!):

Meanwhile, camcorders started to become more affordable. I remember being surprised that I could afford one by the late 90s or early 2000s, right as my jiu jitsu and judo competition intensity was stepping up. The camcorder really democratized the idea of being able to make your own film, and “making a video” became common parlance.

By this time, “Video files” became a completely normal thing to hear, even outside of computer-nerd circles. You weren’t just recording video footage onto tapes now—DVDs had all but replaced VHS tapes as the dominant paradigm by the early 2000s, and it was becoming possible to download and store files directly on a computer.

YouTube further democratized video production by making it ever easier to upload your own videos, and as internet speeds increased over time, the smartphone was the perfect tool to shoot and upload your own videos directly.

“Let me make a quick video for you” isn’t something you’d hear 30 years ago, but you can do it without leaving your couch today.

We have streaming video any time you want it, video on demand, live video, video chats, video conferences… Video is everywhere.

What ways have you used the word “video” in your own life? Are there other uses you remember that I’ve missed?