Karl Video Rides the Cutting Edge of TV 'Infotainment'

Contemporaneous 1984 Washington Post trade profile of Karl Video at its peak. Documents the sell-through (buy-to-own) strategy founder Stuart Karl, then 30, used to build the home-video category: 350,000 US units of Jane Fonda's Workout plus 75,000 overseas and 60,000 videodisc sales, grossing $30M+; a 28-title catalogue of instructional "long shelf life" tapes (Prime Time, the pregnancy tape, Richard Simmons, Jose Eber, casino gambling); and his push to move retailers from rental to sales. Coins "infotainment" (information + entertainment) as the field's long-term future. Primary-era evidence for the special-interest-wedge and sell-through-category-creation frameworks. Body retrieved verbatim from the 2017-08-28 Wayback snapshot (full text, not paywalled in /archive/).