[Animats]

I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes.

Other bad ideas of that era: Polaroid once developed a VHS cartridge with a mechanical counter of how many times it had been played. After some number of plays, the tape jammed.

[Wistar]

In the early 80's, I modified a VHS cassette by placing a cylindrical high-strength magnet adjacent to the tape path on the takeup side. There was a nearly perfect pre-existing pocket in the case webbing to put the magnet with a dot of glue. The idea was to make a play-once, self-erasing cassette. Although not perfect, it was effective enough to really screw up the second playback. Probably screwed up the tape deck, too, but I don't recall any real evidence of that.

[washadjeffmad]

That was a common "self destruct" mechanism for VHSes issued by courts and other legal agencies for sharing decisions and reviewing certain evidence.

One of the VHS archiving communities I'm in found one in a sealed envelope at an estate sale, played it, and then started a thread describing the content and asking if anyone knew why they couldn't get it to play a second time.

[Wistar]

I played with the idea as one way to deal with a problem client. At the time I had never heard of the method.

[msikora]

That is interesting, do you have more info on that self-jamming videotape?

[betamaxthetape]

Do you have any more information on this? It sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more!

[Animats]

The play counter? Lots of patents in the 1980s. 3M, IBM, CBS, Polaroid. Dead end commercially.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4586101A/en

[betamaxthetape]

Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.