During the early days of film, movie reproduction occurred at the film production house where multiple copies of the final celluloid print would be made and distributed to theaters. The 1980's proved to be a watershed decade for the movie industry. With the introduction of several new forms of distribution including half-inch cassettes, cable, and direct satellite broadcast, the movie industry underwent a darastic reorganization. In 1985, for the first time since the 1910s, independent film producers released more films than the major studios in order to keep up with the growing demand for cable and home-video markets. (Britannica.com)
There is a strong correlation between the various medias used in the music industry and those used in the film industry. In the 1980's, while VHS and Betamax were dueling for market control, audio cassette tapes were the major means of distributing music in the United States. Both video and audio cassettes used essentially the same sort of magnetic technology. Because of this shared technological background, both formats also suffered from generation loss in which duplicates are of slightly worse quality than the original.