Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, testifying to the House of Representatives in 1982: 
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

However, if you are an advertiser who has paid $280,000 a minute to advertise, he feels a very large pain in his stomach as well as in his checkbook because it destroys the reason for free television, the erasure, the blotting out, the fast forwarding, the visual searching, the variable beta scans. The technology is there and I am one who has a belief that before the next few years the Japanese will have built into their machines an automatic situation that kills the commercial.
(via MarketWatch)

First of all, what a crybaby.  A technology that might take money out of the giant pockets of movie studios and advertising firms?  Boo-hoo.  Second, he was right.  Broadcast television used to be free; VCRs probably played at least a small role in destroying free TV. #entertainment