Even though it seems that everyone has a digital camcorder, and that everyone is making, sharing and uploading their homemade movies onto the internet, it actually wasn't always that way. That's because video cameras were originally designed to broadcast television images to people. That means that when the camcorder was first developed, having ordinary and everyday people use them wasn't really the purpose of the video camera. That's because video cameras, in the beginning, were big bulky devices and weren't really that portable.

When home-use video camcorders were first being developed, it was designed to be used in conjunction with two devices. First of all, you needed the video camera itself to record the movie. The movie would be recorded onto a tape that was located inside the camcorder itself. Once you wanted to playback the recorded movie, you had to take the tape out of the camcorder and place and play it in a VCR. While that makes sense, it also meant that you had to have both machines, or else neither would work properly.