There were a bunch of early videotape systems. I once came across a device in a surplus store which was a cassette rewinder for a large, strange cassette. It had a key lock and a counter. The idea was that video stores would rent out cassettes you could only watch once, because the player lacked a rewind mechanism. Then you had to return the video. The store would rewind it, an event counted by the counter. The store would be billed accordingly, by the movie distributor.

Fortunately this approach did not catch on.