During the vhs era I don't think many had a dual tape device or a way to copy tape to tape so I think it was much more common to record from live TV than rentals. There are recreations of this on yt and elsewhere with old public domain shows and movies interlaced with commercials and trailers and stuff from the same time. DVD era I think it was a bit more popular to have a CD burner for music than DVD burner at first so people could rip DVDs easily enough with a reader but stored them on hard drives or heavily compressed on CD until DVD burners became more widely available and affordable.