The VCR and the Arrival of Time Shifting
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Before recording devices became common, watching television meant watching whatever was broadcast at whatever hour it aired, with no real alternative. The home video recorder changed that arrangement fundamentally, giving viewers the ability to capture a broadcast and watch it whenever actually suited them instead.
This shift, later called time shifting, quietly undermined the tight grip that fixed schedules had always held over viewing habits. A missed episode no longer meant a missed episode entirely, and viewers began building small personal libraries of recorded tapes, rewatched deliberately rather than caught only once by chance.
The device also introduced a genuinely new social habit: sharing recorded tapes with friends or family who had missed a broadcast themselves. In a small way, this anticipated the on demand culture that would eventually replace it, proving that the appetite for flexible viewing predates streaming by decades.