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A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation, or a special event, and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The vast majority of amateur film formats lacked audio, shooting silent film.
The 1970s saw the advent of consumer camcorders that could record an hour or two of video on one relatively inexpensive videocassette which also had audio and did not need to be developed the way film did. This was followed by digital video cameras that recorded to flash memory, and most recently smartphones with video recording capability, made the creation of home movies easier and much more affordable to the average person.
The technological boundaries between home-movie-making and professional movie-making are becoming increasingly blurred as prosumer equipment often offers features previously only available on professional equipment.
In recent years, clips from home movies have been available to wider audiences through television series such as Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV (1986 debut) in Japan,[1][2] America's Funniest Home Videos (1989 debut) in the United States,[3] You've Been Framed! (1990 debut) in Britain,[4] Video Gag (1990 debut) in France,[5] and online video sharing sites such as YouTube (founded 2005), that of users who want to share their home movies as user-generated content.[6] The popularity of the Internet, and wider availability of high-speed connections has provided new ways of sharing home movies, such as video blogs (vlogs) and video podcasts.