VHS was the first home video format to really take off.
Its main competitors were Beta, LaserDisc and CED. Beta and LaserDisc were both far more expensive than VHS, while CED was bulky and had some quality-control issues that scared off many consumers. LaserDisc and CED were non-recordable media, and while blank Beta tapes could be purchased for recording programming from TV, it suffered from a major drawback that affected all three of the VHS competitors: storage capacity.
CED discs could hold 60 minutes of video per side. If you were watching a movie that was more than an hour long (which is to say, pretty much any movie), you would have to get up and manually flip over the record to watch the rest. If it was more than 2 hours long, it was sold on multiple discs, each of which came in a heavy, bulky plastic caddy for protection.
LaserDisc initially came in the high-quality CAV format, which only held 30 minutes of programming per side. People quickly got tired of flipping the disc after half an hour and then swapping to an entirely new disc after another half hour, so the longer-playing but technically inferior CLV standard was developed. These discs could hold up to an hour of video on each side, much like a CED. Some high-end players eventually flipped the disc for you, so if you had a single-disc movie in CLV format and an expensive player, you didn't have to get up and flip the disc at all... but you did have to wait for the player to start reading the other side. And again, if the movie was over 2 hours long, it was on multiple discs.
Originally, Beta could hold no more than an hour on a tape. Eventually players were released that could record at half tape speed, increasing the capacity to two hours. This enabled an entire movie to be played continuously, as long as it was under two hours long. Longer movies still had to be released on multiple tapes.
VHS tapes could hold up to 4 hours of video in Standard Play mode, and up to 12 hours in Super Long Play.
That's all well and good, but why would anyone be interested in VHS today? It's a good question.
Since VHS was the dominant format for home video for such a long time, and since it was the first, the market was saturated with players. When production costs dropped over time, authoring a program on VHS became financially viable for even small-time producers and publishers. Once DVD hit the market and started to pick up steam, it became even cheaper to put stuff out on VHS because there was a huge amount of tape stock that was in lower demand. This had a wonderful end result:
There is some seriously weird shit out there on VHS.
Weird NJ, the excellent semiannual magazine chronicling... well, weird stuff in New Jersey, put out a VHS tape in 1999. Some of the locations and people featured are the Lawn of 1,023 Milk Bottles, the Gates of Hell, and The King of the Road Ed Geil, an Elvis impersonator who performed by the side of the road just for the hell of it. The production quality is laughable and the features are super weird, and it's one of the coolest tapes in my collection.
Remember that music video that played all the time on MTV in the 90's? The claymation one telling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the form of a metal song? That was produced by Green Jellö (later spelled Green Jellÿ for legal reasons, but pronounced the same) for their 1992 video-only album Cereal Killer. Yeah, they wrote and recorded an album, made a music video for each song, and then released it only as a VHS videotape. Okay, later on they put out a CD, called "Cereal Killer Soundtrack," but originally the plan was for the band itself to be video-only. A weird idea from a weird band with ties to GWAR and Maynard James Keenan of Tool. It's one of the prized items in my collection.
Educational, religious and children's videos tend to be some of the stranger items that can be found on VHS, and recently I managed to find one that looks promising. It's called "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" and is intended to teach you how to successfully run your own puppet-based Christian ministry. It's 103 minutes of what I can only assume are extremely creepy and amusing lessons. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to soon, after which it will probably be sent off to Red Letter Media if it's good enough.
You haven't heard of Red Letter Media? Well, they're a bunch of really funny folks who do short films, feature-length films, movie and video game reviews, and other assorted jackassery. I'm a fan of their strange sense of humor and I especially love a show they occasionally put out called Best of the Worst. Each episode they watch three obscure movies, most of which were only put out on VHS, and then discuss them at length and ultimately choose the titular best of the worst.
From time to time they do a Wheel of the Worst episode, where they've got a number of non-movie tapes pinned to a rotating wheel, and spinning the wheel decides which ones they'll have to watch. "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" seems like prime fodder for that. I highly recommend you check it out--it might even get you interested in what other bizarre crap you can find on VHS!
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