The Original Video Animation (OVA) market — Japanese anime produced for direct sale on home video, bypassing television and theatrical release — emerged with Dallos (1983) and dominated the back half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. The format allowed studios to produce more ambitious, more adult-targeted, and more visually dense work than TV broadcast economics permitted. The OVA market collapsed in the early 2000s as DVD and later streaming displaced VHS.
Origin
Mamoru Oshii's Dallos (1983, Studio Pierrot) is generally recognised as the first OVA. The format's commercial logic was straightforward: VHS penetration in Japanese households had reached mass scale, and the price of a single-volume VHS release (¥10,000+ at launch) supported per-minute production budgets several times higher than TV anime. The audience was older — university students, working adults — and the content adapted accordingly: cyberpunk, hard SF, horror, mecha aimed at hobbyists, and some adult-oriented work.
Peak years
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the OVA market produced a high volume of single- and multi-volume works. Key titles include Megazone 23 (1985), Gunbuster (1988), Patlabor (1988 OVA), Bubblegum Crisis (1987), 3×3 Eyes (1991), and the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs (1992–). The format also provided the production economics for highly ambitious one-off works such as Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987, theatrical but with OVA-style budget) and Riding Bean (1989).
Decline
Through the mid-1990s and 2000s, several factors eroded the OVA market: DVD reduced per-unit pricing without proportionally reducing piracy; late-night TV broadcast slots opened, allowing originally OVA-style adult content to be funded through production committees and broadcast to a larger audience; and the rental-market decline meant the OVA had no equivalent of the kashihon system to absorb back-catalogue. By the mid-2000s, the format had effectively been folded into 'bonus episodes' shipped with Blu-ray collections of TV anime. Standalone OVA productions are now rare.