Macrovision 2 - the strangest sensation of being watched...

Like the tape in The Ring, Macrovision knows whether you are watching or copying a videocassette.

If the horror genre, it's familiar tropes and their ability to evoke anxiety, can convey an anti-piracy message from within the medium perceived to be at risk of illicit duplication – as in the FACT Public information short and, more pertinently, as per Retrotechnophobia, in The Ring (2002) -  couldn't the medium contain a anti-piracy technology that included and demonstrated some of the same tropes? How uncanny and capable of evoking anxiety can video technology be – when things start to go wrong?

In The Ring, the protagonist, Rachel figures out the cursed tape offers different outcomes for those who copy it from those it merely watch it – effectively, it knows which you are doing - and so did a system called Macrovision.

Macrovision was an anti-copy technology developed in the 1980s during the home video boom. A rented or purchased pre-recorded tape with Macrovision installed could be watched on a television or monitor without issue but any attempts to copy the recording on a second VCR would be 'rendered unacceptable' ¹

As a device installed by video distributors, Macrovision naturally wants you to watch the tape but doesn't want you to copy it. Macrovision expects that the viewer will ignore the FBI or similar warning at the start of the tape because no matter how threatening, it was believed to have no further agency or knowledge of whether it's warning was being observed within the privacy of the video users home.

Macrovision enters said home concealed within the tapes interstitial spaces where it sits in wait until activated by a deviance from guidelines. It may be watched a dozen times without incident or error but any attempt to copy it will reveal the presence of the signal.

VCRs contain Automatic Gain Control circuits (AGC) that monitor an incoming external video signal and adjust aspects of it to a suitable, stable level for recording. Macrovision contains pseudo pulses ² that sweep across a range of amplitudes that confuse the VCRs AGC forcing it to attempt correction and to struggle to maintain a commensurate recording level. This results in distorted images, undulating brightness and colour, flickering, and image tearing.³

In effect, the Macrovision signal tricks the VCR's AGC into reacting as if the incoming video was wildly unstable thus causing a circuit originally intended to maintain a stable recording, into creating an chaotic, unstable one. A television or monitor has no such circuitry and the Macrovision signal is ignored, the protected recording is displayed without distortion.

As stand alone, non interactive playback media, VHS tapes were never considered to be aware of what we were doing with them. The unease generated by discovering a mysterious agent within a inanimate object may evoke the shades of the eerie as described by Mark Fisher. Something is present that should not be there.⁴

This is the first stage of a tape copiers encounter with a tape containing Macrovision.

Unlike contemporary platform based technologies, Home video (read for our purposes VHS) quickly peaked in it's ability to diversify, emerge, and 'wow' the user with new innovations located within the pre-existing medium.

VideoPlus, 4 heads, 6 heads, stereo sound, for many these developments may have appeared more gimmicks and the stuff of salesman's patter than any generational evolution or development. There were some improvements and additions but there was certainly no Moore's law for VHS.

The tapes played and recorded more or less the same. For twenty years the capabilities of the format barely changed and the greatest development would appear to have been the race to lower the price per unit – perhaps further degrading ownership status, removing the glamour of the luxury item and upon achieving market saturation and ubiquity, consigning it to the ranks most mundane of household consumer items.

Home Video's potential to amaze wore off quickly as it was soon taken for granted, perceived to be an inferior conduit to other media, cinema, television, etc. Video's ability to inspire or drive utopian strategies and rhetoric, just as the internet would in the 90s, peaked early in video utopianist spaces such as Radical Software ⁵ and by the time consumers were watching sell-through copies of Videodrome or The Ring, the medium's chances of asserting real change had often appear to have become all but forgotten.

Perhaps for this reason, suddenly discovering that a tape knows what you are doing with it must have provoked a frisson of anxiety. Having mysteriously transgressed from inanimate container to intelligent observer how would the copier have known where the tapes knew found agency would end? Not only does Macrovision, like Caetlin Benson Allott's description of the character Noah's frustration with the tape's timecode, 'reduce the viewer's agency within the video apparatus' ⁶ it, on it's production of an abnormal copy, informs us, we are moving towards the previously unknown, that 'something has not worked out' ⁷

As a medium on which to view movies, videotape may have lacked in resolution but it performed very well in terms of privacy and isolation within systems of distribution. The material had to be acquired - rented, purchased or traded but once obtained it could be viewed, usually in the comfort of the home with anonymity pretty much guaranteed. Before even considering ISP logs or malicious internet trackers, we could contrast the fact that all our Youtube and Netflix user interfaces regularly remind us that they know exactly what we watched and when. With this in mind, one could argue that never before or since has viewing audio visual material, in certain regards, been as discreet as it was with VHS. ⁸

Although a tape copier might not immediately know it, Macrovision's capabilities were limited, and stopped far short of, for example, reporting back to Warner Home Video that Blade Runner was being duped, including such information as where and by whom (we'd have to wait for the digital revolution for that)

But what it could do, as well as achieving it's primary objective of ensuring that any illicit copy of a Macrovision protected tape was rendered unacceptable by generating unacceptable pictures, was to elicit, just as Samara's tape did initially for Rachael, confusion and unease and demand the question – where the hell is this coming from and how can it know what I am doing?

(1) Method and apparatus for processing a video signal so as to prohibit the making of acceptable video tape recordings thereof
Apr 17, 1985 - https://patents.justia.com/patent/4631603
(2) ibid.
(3) a video error that sees the top of image appear to distort and fold downwards
(4) Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (Repeater, 2017)
(5) Radical Software was a magazine concerned with the work and aspirations of videos first experimenters, artists and activists. https://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html

(6) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p116
(7)    ibid p125
(8) clearly watching the flow of analogue television would be hard to beat here – for much of the VCR era, in the UK and Europe anyway, television channels were very limited (just four in the UK until the late nineties) and so when one viewed TV the was always a least one in four chance of guessing what was being watched.