How Sony's Betamax lost to JVC's VHS Cassette Recorder
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 июн 2014
- In 1976 Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette recorder. It catalyzed the "on demand" of today by allowing users to record television shows, and the machine ignited the first "new media" intellectual property battles. In only a decade this revolutionary machine disappeared, beaten by JVS's version of the cassette recorder. This video tells the story of why Betamax failed. This is one of three videos in a series on marketplace failures of technological objects. www.engineerguy.com/failure.
Наука
When I was a kid in the mid eighties my parents had a beta-max. I hated going to the movie rental store and not being able to get the movie I wanted because everything was mostly on VHS. When we were on vacation someone broke into our home and stole the beta-max. I was so happy when my dad bought a VHS. My grandmother would tape movies off of HBO and send them to us.
"GIMME YOUR WALLET
-could you PLEASE take my betamax aswel?
A burglar? Well, at least you're not an encyclopedia salesman.
I have a 1996 RCA VHS player.
After some time you couldn't record off of HBO tho because to fight piracy they came up with copy guard. When you would play back your copy it would just be scrambled. I remember my dad would talk about this and thinking he was like some sort of fountain of technological knowledge lol, my dad liked tech.
Oh you sadist
Please be kind, and rewind.
I still have Blockbuster cassettes of the original Star Wars trilogy with that very sticker over the clear portions of the plastic.
Kind of stupid to have a large, opaque sticker over the are where you look to see if a video needed rewinding...
I thought it was funny that when you rented a video game from Blockbuster, they would put it in a box marked "Be Kind, Rewind". Hey, if the last renter didn't rewind the game, do I start with the final boss battle?
Reminds me of renting old Nintendo 64 games from Blockbusters. The Nintendo 64 cartridge would save data directly onto itself instead of on the console/a memory card, so you would rent Ocarina of Time and find random people's save files on there.
Helped me a lot when Majora's Mask came out and I was too stupid to figure out how to access the Astral Observatory.
Do you mean Michel Gondry's movie (_Be Kind, Rewind_) ?
Remember the VHS tape rewinders that came out, all it did was rewind the tape to save wear and tear on your vcr, seems like another lifetime now, lol
Anyone else remember the remote with a 50ft cord that plugged into the vcr?
by the time i learned to meow it was IR wireless remote..
50 foot? Ours wasn't even 10. We made my little brother sit on the floor because it didn't reach to the couch.
@@glenm99 Haha
my dad handed me down a mute button my grandpa had made for their TV in the 60s, it's a little black bakelite box with a mercury switch inside and on/off labels on it's sides. it had a cord going to a 3.5mm jack, I never saw the TV but he had modified it to have a plug that sent the audio signal or power for the amps or something thru the cord to the box sitting on the couch, when u flip the box over it mutes it. my family has been avoiding TV commercials since then lmao
We didn't have that on ours but in the last 80s I was working for a Cable company doing installs and was hooking up a cable box to the line and found a little box with a switch that had played and pauses on it. the old lady forget where she put that and was so happy she could pause her movies with out getting up lol
Legend has it that my dad is still trying to set the timer.
Me too!
Ha ha. They were so complicated by modern standards.
@Tela Mamo Not as much of an idiot as you replying to a tongue in cheek remark. 😂
@Tela Mamo You're a twit.
@Tela Mamo Really? No one likes your kind of comments on the internet. Go away and play with your toys elsewhere. You do not have the mental capacity to understand wit, basic comedy and sense of humor.
I think it also had a lot to do with patents. Many manufacturers could produce VHS compatible decks, but only Sony could make betamax. And Sony was always more expensive. So, sort of how firewire lost out to USB for similar reasons.
Yes, Sony only licensed the technology to a precious few others for manufacturing decks and cassettes. it's also similar to the D-VHS system. 1080i picture, though we already had DVDs and it was good enough and smaller. people had had it with tapes back then.
+The 8-Bit Guy Check your notes. Sony also invented VHS, but never brought it to market because the picture quality was not good enough. So they went back to the drawing board an adapted the 3/4" Umatic machine to take 1/2" tape and the Betamax was born. Sony stupidly sold the patent to JVC and JVC brought it to market. I have several old Betamax recorders in my old collection including the old SL7200 Beta1 recorder. The one that has no clock. There were 2 timer clocks available, a mechanical and digital LED clock. I have the LED time clock for it. The mechanical timer is a rarity as the digital one followed within a few months. My first machine was an RCA VCt201, and that was a 2 speed machine that would record 4 hours of pathetic quality.
+12voltvids wrong. JVC developed VHS, not Sony. 8bit guy is correct in all respects.
+videodistro Incorrect. Sony developed VHS first and NEVER marketed it. They found the format DID NOT produce what they considered acceptable quality.They didn't name the format VHS as they never released that format. They went back, and worked on scaling down the existing 3/4 format into a half inch format U format they named Betamax..It is all out there if you search for it.Here is a little quote""In September 1976, JVC announced the VHS-format VCR to compete head to head against Betamax. With this announcement, the VCR format battle began. The JVC product boasted two hours of recording time twice that of Betamax. The year before the Betamax release, Sony had approached Matsushita and JVC, its two partners for the U Format, about unifying product specifications. At that time, Sony had disclosed information regarding the Betamax specifications and technology to the two companies. In response, Matsushita and JVC delayed any decisions about unifying standards for a year. After Sony announced the advent of the video age and followed this with an aggressive sales drive, JVC began its own highly effective advertising campaign.
Sony took a closer look at the VHS format and everyone was aghast. The technology and know-how that Sony had willingly disclosed when it proposed the unification of the U and Beta formats was incorporated in the VHS format. Although Sony had freely given the two companies access to its basic, patented technology, it was impossible for Sony to hide its shock and surprise."Make NO mistake Sony developed the VHS standard, and Sony even went as far as saying that when they brought their first VHS machines to market. They couldn't make that claim in their adverts, and sales material if it wasn't true because they would have been sued. But they didn't have to worry about that because they were the original inventor. JVC was just a bunch of crooks.
+videodistro Nope. Sony came up with a system so similar there's not much to distinguish it from the JVC patent. They just didn't put it into production or patent it and JVC took the initiative. If you notice, he doesn't say "invented", he says "maker" of VHS. A subtle difference in historical retrospect, but I'm sure it bothered the Hell out of Sony when they had to pay royalties to JVC for a widget they'd thought up and left on the drawing boards. But over time, I've grown tired of Sony's arrogance. They have often had "good gear", and been entirely too proud of it in terms of retail ask. They've been the architects of their own demise. And I'll miss them when they're gone. Every television I've owned since 1988 is a Sony. I think if Samsung gets its audio quality together, that's where I'm headed next.
I was kind of disappointed you didn't go into more details about how they work, but still nice to see a new video.
Yeah, I think that these fantastic engineer guy videos inspire the viewer to make interest in and look up more information about these historical events and not least the mechanisms behind - opposed to going into detail which could be a long video if everyday consumers (as me) were to understand it all. An introduction. Perhaps mr. Hammack should consider a second channel for in depth explanations? :)
Theis Andersen He's released a few books that do just that. In depth explanations www.engineerguy.com/elements/index.htm
We've been thinking about making a second videos that discusses the mechanisms ... the machine are fascinating ....
His description was "Just Good Enough"
***** It would be great if you would do that!
I still have a working Betamax!
LOL... Do you party like it's 1999?
@@robertthomas5906 You have no idea how appropriate that is Robert, my roomie is a Prince Nut and at one time had painted the dining room purple and made it into a Prince shrine which highlighted my BETA copy of Purple Rain! LOL!
Me too, and 4 or 5 VCR's. lol
DIP in clear resin and preserve it for the next generation to come in 2000yrs to see!!
so do I but it's not a Beta Hifi machine.
Two hour versus one hour tapes. In my book at least, that says everything I need to know when making my decision.
I remember renting beta max as a little kid. And felt the same way. But what movies were an hour or less??? Shortest movies are maybe 1 hr. 15 mins.
You're able to explain extremely complicated mechanisms as simple as the ABC's. I love it. You're a good layman's teacher
I could listen to this guy read a phone book and still be entertained
Check out his newest vid he reads the phone book of whole Manhattan!
Lol
so could I
what's a 'phone book' ? 😂
It’s like a warm blanket
"The winner is usually the one that's just good enough"
Wow that's a really good way of thinking of it.
As well as depressing.
It's got more like that unfortunately, regarding everything.
VHS was better though, it had a huge capacity advantage and the difference in quality was irrelevant, given that quality was variable and you would sacrifice so much playback time to choose the highest quality option.
The fact he used a Star Trek cassette in the demo - PERFECT !
I think Star Trek II was the first $20 or maybe it was the first $40 VHS Tape sold. and Star Trek IV was the first $20 tape sold. Most were like $50 to $70 back then.
Betamax lost out because of licensing. The machine was a closed, proprietary system that cost much more to buy licenses for. The VHS system was the first system that allowed manufacturers cheap buy-in on patents and cheap on-going (per device) costs, that maintained the standard.
The engineering? These two machines didn't define their respective destinies. There were many iterations after these machine that did that. These machines were first-shots of a video format war that was about Sony attempting to lock-out a market (their suggestion that the machine should be the national standard of Japan) and to extract very expensive manufacturing deals.
JVC needed manufacturing capacity, and used FRAND to do that. Within 3 years, Akai, Matsushita, JVC, Sharp, RCA, Rank, were all making machines at full capacity, driving down costs further. So this wasn't so much an engineering battle. It was a licensing, manufacturing capacity war.
Also - The duplication machines were a factor. The Pornography industry in the US saw these machines as a revenue source. Porn distributors wanted to buy Sony Beta, but Sony wouldn't sell the duplication machines. Panasonic did... If you want to sell lots of something - give it to the porn industry.. Good enough was just that...
Sounds like ios vs android, too bad there weren't so many hipsters around back then or betamax would've won.
Same thing happened with Apple vs IBM. The IBM BIOS was reverse engineered by compaq and then licensed to everyone. The IBM pc market was flooded with cheaper clones. The PC won the war against apple and all other little systems.
It was little more then that for the computers. Gaming was a big factor. Apple use to be the machine you would play games on but they tried to be more "professional" while windows came out with "direct" which allowed programmers to harness the power of the individual components in the machine (like the video and sound card). This led to more companies making games for PC and now the PC had it's original professional market and also took in the gaming market. This is what tipped the scale in the PC favor.
DoomFinger511
The DirectX thing came late into the game. There were plenty of DOS games. I think Windows 3.1 never had DirectX.
It became a need with Win 95 because MS wanted to get rid of DOS mode. OpenGL was also released by MS but performed poorly (opengl32.dll did the software rendering). SGI disliked it and coded opengl.dll which had software optimizations. Then video card makers wrote proper drivers (included OpenGL) and the performance difference between opengl.dll and opengl32.dll became moot. Both could talk to the real opengl driver of the card.
In a nutshell Betamax is like Apple and VHS is like android
I was there when the VHS first came out, I sold the first VHS recorder in my local market, the battle boiled down to this, under agreement with JVC, RCA came to retail market first in the US. The Sony didn't even have a clock, you could buy a analog clock timer separately, and analog clocks are inaccurate, just like an alarm clock, set if for a time and it might come on + or - 5 minutes, a problem when you could only record for one hour, and it could only record one show. If I remember right the very first model had a digital timer and only recorded one time, but within a few months the RCA came with 4 programs, you could record 4 hours and automatically 4 different programs on different channels, all for $999, as I recall the Sony with the optional analog timer was $1500. Within 6 months RCA/JVC brought out a 6 hour tape, about a year later Sony finally came out with 2 hour recording time. The RCA/JVC was substantially cheaper and recorded several times longer, the writing was on the wall. As I recall JVC brought their own brand to the US market 6 months or a year after the RCA came out. RCA and JVC had a long standing relationship, JVC was originally Japan Victor Corp, loosely affiliated with RCA Victor, the older JVC products even had the old RCA trademark of Nipper the dog staring into the Victrola, listening to "His Master's Voice".
+G56AG More convincing an argument than porn alone. I guess simple minds need simpler explanations.
In the end it is the consumer who decides who wins a format war, just look at what happened with blu-ray and hd dvd.
We had a RCA with four hour capacity. When we bought it most movies were super expensive but the record abilities made the purchase worth the money. Blank tapes in those days were about $20 dollars opposed to a movie at 60. Within a year prices on movies themselves dropped significantly but blanks were always the cheapest.
I have thought about this subject. I used to think big money was being exchanged between unknown people and the VHS was shoved down the throats of the consumer. Your explanation is much more viable. Thanks for commenting.
My mom and dad had a Magnavox VCR made in Japan. It lasted for probably about 12 years, and we didn’t have internet for most if not all of those years so it got used a lot. Our cable was ran into the VCR, most people ran theirs to the TV. We had a remote that worked both, but the TV channel stayed on either two or three.
Great video! Trying to teach this to modern media students is taxing as they have always been digital consumers. I can't wait to show them this! Thanks for making it!
For the consumer, the big deal difference would probably be that you could record whole movies with the VHS. If I were buying a video recorder back in 1983, it would be this factor that would determine which one I would purchase.
Absolutely the biggest factor. If 80-90% of the movies are 2 hours or less, the VHS only needs one tape. That's all I need to hear to be convinced. And over time the storage increased - I remember Gladiator (a 2h45m movie) fitting on a single cassette. VHS for its storage wins without debate.
You could slow the tape from standard 2hr to lower quality 6hr.
@@AJR-zg2py I used to have a bunch of David Lean movies on VHS. Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago, and one other that was like a worse version of Dr Zhivago. All averaging 3.5 hours PLUS adverts beforehand.
@@artsmith103 but who needs that when 240 min tapes were available?
@@danek_hren those 240 minute tapes were prone to getting chewed up.
Aye carumba! I never thought I'd see the day where a single wooden table would survive carrying two 1970's video recorders! Not even Popeye could lift two of them together, after a heavy session on the ol' spinach!
Beta machines were also more time consuming to align mechanically. With a VHS machine you could often get by with a minor adjustment of the right hand guide post when the tracking drifted too far off the center detent, whereas you pretty much had to do a complete realignment on a Beta machine which usually required the service manual, torque gauges and special alignment tapes. You could usually tweak up a VHS machine using nothing but a good quality movie, then the machine would work just fine although admittedly a bit out of factory spec. Beta had pretty much dropped out of the market by the time VCR's got really cheap, using a single motor and a bunch of plastic gears to assign the motor to the various functions, so any Beta machine you find will be high quality. For the record, I'm a huge Sony fan - their stuff is really built to last and their circuit designs are excellent as well. However, I don't care for dedicated audio equipment made by Sony - it just doesn't seem to sound as good or handle signal overloading as gracefully as gear from other manufacturers.
Here in England it's always known as Betamax. Never heard it called Beta before.
@@ajs41 You must be very isolated then! I was a TV/Video repair man and always referred to them as Beta videos. Betamax was rarely cited.
The Supreme Court case that legalized the Betamax VCR was thanks in part to Mister Rogers who actually testified before the court saying he did not mind the use of it to timeshift his show, but also spoke out on behalf of the TV industry in general saying that it was time for TV to stop programming people's schedules.
The real reason that the Betamax lost was that Sony insisted on keeping their technology patents for themselves, and just a few other Sony "sister" companies.
JVC sold their VHS techno license to any company that wanted it, so every cheapo electronics company made a VHS machine: everyone from Lloyds to Realistic, to Sears!
Beta was truly better, but the machines cost more and were harder to find due to the limited number of companies making them. VHS machines, under hundreds of different brand names, flooded the market with inexpensive product and won out, even though (in the beginning) they were inferior to Beta.
Even Sony ended making VHS machines.
Sears had a Beta... Hitachi had a Beta.. Toshiba had a Beta.. Beta lost out because of the one hour play time and RCA jumping on the VHS band wagon. Beta was better, but not a lot better.
Dude the guy told you why the betamax Lost. We don't need your so-called know-it-all ass given reasons why the betamax didn't succeed. The guy in the video told us why the betamax didn't succeed.
I remember Realistic. Where are they today? Is Toshiba and Hitachi still going? I miss all these great companies.
Not really true that. In 1983 the best selling video recorder of any format in the UK was the Sanyo VTC5000 Beta model, outselling all VHS models. It was followed by another huge hit, the VTC5150. I bought the latter in 1984 for £239.99, a bargain price for a brand new machine in 1984. Toshiba also built Beta machines, also sold as Bush. In the early days, there were not actually that many VHS brand names either, I can recall: JVC/Ferguson (same machines), Panasonic, Hitachi and Sharp. At this time Philips/Grundig/B&O were selling V2000. All the own-brand junk and cheapo brands came along later in the 1980s.
Exactly what i read in a hifi magazine in the mid 80ties. The same article claimed VHS was actually an invention of Sony itself but since they aspired a better quality (and were convinced they would win the fight once their new aim called betamax was on the marked) they sold VHS to JVC who smartly gave away the technology almost for free to other brands. Never found any other sources confirming the claim that Sony invented VHS and sold it to JVC. In the Netherlands the rental video marked soon choose VHS (betamax rentals were harder and harder to get) and as usual the porn industry played a vital role in favor of VHS (more then 50% of all video's sold and rented in those early years were said to be porn and Sony choose not to be involved in porn). You'll be amazed how much porn influenced developments. When DVD came out it fought a similar battle with an alternative system as Betamax and VHS did. I can't even remember how that alternative system was called that almost beat DVD but DVD won the battle for no other reason then that the porn industry choose DVD over it's concurrent. Porn was also the first to explore 06 numbers.
The Philips N1500 was the first consumer video cassette recorder in the early 1970s. They also produced the N1700 later (still before Beta came out) which used the same tapes but ran at a slower speed for more recording time; the tapes from the N1500 couldn't be played on the N1700 or vice versa. Video and audio quality were very good because of the high tape speed, but recording time for the N1500 was only something like 45 minutes per tape.
Video 2000 was introduced by Philips after Betamax and VHS had already established themselves on the market for a while. It had a maximum recording time of 2x4 hours: the cassette was roughly the size of a VHS tape but was reversible, so after recording 4 hours, you could reverse the cassette and record another 4 hours. Later on, an LP mode increased the recording time to 2x8 hours. The Dynamic Track Following (DTF) system made for noise-free special functions such as cue, review, slow-motion and pause and made it unnecessary to have a "tracking" control. VHS and Beta machines could only do that by adding more video heads. DTF was later also used in Video-8. The tape in V2000 ran somewhat slower than VHS but Philips used Dynamic Noise Reduction (DNR) to ensure that audio quality was still acceptable. All V2000 recorders were controlled digitally and the earliest recorders were very heavy (18kg / 40lbs).
V2000 was only available in Europe (most Americans have still never heard of a VCR system with reversible tapes), and from what I understand, Philips didn't allow porn rental tapes to be released on the system, so it failed. I thought the porn thing was what happened to Beta too.
Educational and thorough in its topics. Also, very smooth dialogue from the presenter. Well done
No idea why this video was in my recommended but you've got a subscription from me. This was fascinating.
Don't forget about porn. Sony didn't want their product being used to sell adult videos.
I was sitting here thinking the same thing.
They saw the light when Blu-ray came out.
martinitime1975 ya this video totally missed one of the biggest reasons why VHS won out. Porn industry.
All porn then and now is on betamax. Those redtube videos you always watch? Betamax. Recorded off a tv with a PXL 2000 and then recorded with a phone and uploaded.
King Alfred Wow. Even the HD clips?
What about pornhub?
Are those all betamax too?
I'm learning a lot.
Thanks.
This guy always delivers, and never disappoints.
Great video, Bill. My first video tape machine was Betamax. I eventually switched to VHS because 1) Beta could only record, at most, two hours. VHS could record SIX. I also could see that most people were buying VHS and I could not notice much difference between Beta and VHS. The same thing happened with CDs over LPs, although vinyl has made a comeback. CDs could be played in your car, at work and tracks could be selected. DVDs took over VHS and now both video and audio are played on compressed MP4 and MP3 files. Less quality, but more convenience. The difference is not important to most people.
Yes I'm late, but LPs were succeeded by cassette then CD. Though LP has come back for mostly the wrong reasons, as modern music production has made the end result more sterile, so making an LP and listening to that version forces some some of that warmth back in because of the limitations of LP.
Most DVDs can do about as good as VHS, without some of the analog interference issues VHS suffers from. And both MP3 and 4 can do basically anything given enough bandwidth and storage. Many early MP3s were forced to cut the bit rate down to get things fitting on early flash based MP3 players.
in 1985 when my parents bought our first VCR the saleslady at Sears tried to sell us a Beta recorder but we went with the cheaper VHS recorder. Turned out we made the right choice due to the fact that within a couple of years Beta became pretty much obsolete.
BTW, this was the first format war I can remember. Of course, in later years we would see the war between PC and Mac as well as HD DVD and Blu Ray.
Does anyone else notice the huge editing error here? While talking about fixed head video recorders, the shot is FILM projector.
We know, we know. When we were making the video we could not find any shots of a reel-to-reel video tape record with the proper license.
***** We knew what you meant though :)
+engineerguy The larger reel-to-reelvideo tape recorders used a similar technique to record high density information on the tape. 1 inch Type B and C types used reel to reel used helical scan (although in different ways), and the old 2 inch quad reel to reel machines used transverse scan (recording vertically on the tape in stripes as the tape went by). The smallness of U-matic, Beta, and U-Matic was due to compromises in video luminance bandwidth that was recorded plus a big compromise in how color was seaparated out and heterodyned down to a low frequency. Remember how colors bled all over the place on these types of machines that used "color-under"? The larger machines like 2 inch quad and the 1 inch formats recorded the whole composite signal with the color intact using FM instead of just recording the lumimance that way and separating the color out. Also, home machines using this technique could get a viewable picture without the use of a time-base corrector, and expensive piece of equipment back in the day.
As I recall, “instant replay” for NHL hockey was done by recording on one machine, stringing the videotape across a room to a second player machine. . . One instant replay per event. . .
I was really surprised when my local video store was shown at 3:06. I'm actually not even sure if it's still in business.
Why should you be surprised? That's my local video store also.
+amorasaki How could they possibly fail when the have the phrase "That's rentertainment" in the window
+engineerguy I'm surprised you have a local video store.
+stonent Still have a Family Video in my town.
Oh, folks still work there... it’s an Arby’s now.
Fun fact, Betamax was named as such because the tape path through an operating machine resembled the Greek symbol.
The same was for Sony's previous U-Matic format, the tape formed a vague U shape when the machine was in use.
This is actually something I've wondered about in the past. Great explanation. Thanks.
Hi Bill, I was actually actively involved in video recording technology at the time and there was another big plus with Betamax in that you could fast forward without retracting the tape into the cassette. Beta was a derivative of the Sony U-Matic tape system used professionally by mobile studios and was much gentler on the tape. Sony also invented the M loading system used in VHS and sold it to JVC. The biggest killer for Beta was that JVC signed up some 10 or 12 companies with "their" system compared to only 2 (Sanyo & Toshiba, Sanyo had a VHS license as well) because Sony was so convinced of their market pull and superiority of the system that a Beta license was more "painful" to acquire. Then they (Beta camp) had trouble getting enough machines out the door and I heard from a number of people that they all wanted a recorder for something big on TV (can't remember if it was the Olympics or the world cup) and there was something like a 3-month delay for Beta compared with walk out the door with a VHS, so many of them opted for VHS.
The exception to this was In Australia where Sanyo managed to flood the market early on but shops were spreading a lie about how VHS was better.
Anyhow, the greater market penetration of VHS drove the rental market which then was the last nail in the coffin.
That clunky eject mechanism you showed was a model related thing rather than VHS/Beta related, Sony always liked smooth eject and did it on most of their Philips cassette players as well. Sony made Early Toshiba units so they had it but Sanyo did there own and it clunky like the VHS. This caused negligible wear BTW.
Lol, if Sony invented M-Loading system, why didn't they used it? Because they are stupid. The longest version of beta cassette was L-830, while VHS had E-240 (a whopping 4 hours on SP speed!). Now, with SLP, you will get 12 hours. With beta... Only about 5 hours. Short recording time, unreliability of the mechanism, overprice and stupid decisions is what made Betamax a loser. Not surprised it failed.
@@danek_hren Beta failed because Sony only got 3 licensees due to asking too much and or making too many restrictions. Beta actually had better picture quality, and was kinder on tapes. What also caused their demise was in the US video hire stores were starting up and because the VHS market was larger the titles came out on VHS first. This then started a downward spiral on sales. BTW, in Australia Beta was far more popular during the early year(s) holding some 80% of sales.
Great video. I always thought the two factors were that JVC licences its patents to other suppliers, allowing more companies to make machines (and lowering the price) and 2) the fact that you could record up to 8 hours at SLP speed on a T-160 cassette was a major selling point for VHS. Beta only had 2 recording speeds initially and maxed out at 4 hours, if I remember correctly.
As you point out, licensing is the real thing that gave VHS the edge.
There was no real reason that Betamax recording times could not be extended as was VHS. By the time machines came out with extended recording times, the betamax was already in trouble.
@@scottfranco1962 there was a very good and insurmountable reason why Betamax couldn't compete with VHS for record time: the cassette. The Betamax cassette was smaller, allowing less tape. Any technology that Sony could use to extend record time, VHS could do better. The ability to store and play a feature length film at the best quality put VHS over the top.
@@scottfranco1962 Except that the cassette was smaller.
Yeah, but Beta was still a lot cleaner.
You could get a nice, clean pause out of it, which VHS never had.
I read an article many years back that said the adult film industry also had a lot to do with this but I guess that also ties in with the movie rental aspect
I have repaired, or at least tried to, fix both VHS and Beta machines for many years. I found that replacing a bad video head on a Beta machine was far more difficult-a lot of fussing around, could never get it right- yet I replaced the heads on many VHS machines with no trouble at all. As for image quality, I bought a Panasonic VHS eighteen years ago, and the quality was-and is- good even at the slower speeds. I made a lot of tapes with it, especially since I got cable in 1999. I now dubbed many of these videos on to DVD in the last few years.
My decision came town the price of blank tapes which were about $29.95 VHS vs 35.99 for Betas and the most important factor... VHSs recorded 2 hours and Betas only half that.
Me too! Although, I got two Ampex blank T-120's for $25 each in 1980. Neither one of them held up, however. Also, my JVC VHS machine, which cost me about $1200, stopped recording at the six-hour speed and took six months to be repaired. Not until the "hi-fi" machines came along could I make decent recordings at the six-hour speed. I still have about 350 cassettes of off-the-air recordings. Last year, I started uploading some material recorded in the eighties to RUclips.
One thing to note. News organizations did adopt the BETA format, and news cameras and news organizations were standardized to BETA due to the higher image quality, and, over time, other drawbacks were reduced. These days, it's all digital I believe.
+John Laury Betacam is what many TV stations switched to from 3/4 U-Matic (the workhorse of the news-gathering industry for a while, and what Beta was a smaller version of). Betacam and Betacam SP were different from Beta.
One of the guys from work used to take home used betacam tapes and use them in his Betamax machine...wouldn’t recommend that with the SP or Digibeta tapes though.
I love the way you displayed a shiny Betamax player and a beat up VHS player as reinforcement :)
When you look inside a VHS and compare it to the mechanism of a Beta machine, it's easy to see that the simplicity of a VHS versus the complex Beta won out. Once HQ VHS came out, it was no contest. The utter simplicity of late versions of VHS mechanisms is truly amazing.
You talk so smoothly. There's no mistakes or blemishes in your speaking. I envy that.
Miracles of multiple takes.
Clever marketing will beat technical quality every time. Look at Apple.
I dont have any apple products, but they definitely have quality
@@nareshwildbones Obviously you haven't had the misfortune of experiencing the weak, perishable build quality of their products..
@@OldbeanO and which product is that, exactly? Still using my 2012 power Mac and my 1st gen iPod still works.
and playstation
@@nareshwildbones but weak Tech/Cost ratio for the tech actually received in hand.
We knew an Italian Australian family in Sydney who bought an entire Sony entertainment system that included a hifi sound system, a monitor and Beta VCR all connected and have great memories watching television and movies there. I remember noticing how well the vcr operated when rewinding and fast forwarding compared to the VHS machines. It was clearly a cute above, but I still loved our first VHS machine we got afterwards in 1988, despite the less elegant noises it made. :)
I can remember on special occasions my parents renting a VHS for a weekend. We would watch new releases such as Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and the Breakfast Club! Good times!
Back around 1980, I was employed by one of the first video rental places in town; Most of the titles were BetaMax, but VHS was right on its heels. The biggest issue at that time was the fact that the players were so expensive, and most people didn't own one. Because of that, our store also rented out the players, and because this wasn't cheap, the cassette rentals were done in groups of 5. It was extremely common to see guys rent a player and 10, 15 cassette tapes every weekend - mainly porn. Later on, women and even seniors came in to rent those tapes... We then started a branch store --a rental counter inside of an Audio retailer named "Sound of Music" - which later became Best Buy. They were very quick to phase out the porn cassettes and shortly thereafter got out of the rental business entirely.
I still remember my dad wanting beta and my mom wanted vhs. We went with vhs and luckily had tons of tapes to choose from.
We had a Betamax machine when I was a kid. It was a huge disappointment when our local video rental stores, one by one, dumped Betamax for VHS. We got a VHS machine when we had to but the picture and sound quality always irritated me. Happily, we can now stream 4K which is a huge improvement. Nice film by the way. A trip down memory lane.
I met famous celebrities at the first video rental store we had in the community. It was such a novelty in the early days and it was the place to meet those people who were early adopters.
The "just good enough" conclusion is so depressing.
Very few people have enough money to by a Cadillac or Lexus (or Betamax). That's why we buy Chevies and Camries (and VHS): they're Good Enough.
...and now we still have to deal with the substandard consequences of that, all these years later.
Browningate How?
@southlondon
Because so many players and cassettes are still in use today with the modern equipment that really shows the limitations of those "good enough" compromises. There is nothing we can do to get more quality out of those recordings because it is the workings of the medium itself that limits what we can get out of it. They're forever stuck being a smudgy, sub-480i mess.
Browningate QQ. Do you really think Beta would look any better compared to the HD stuff we get nowadays? Get real.
This video left out the issue with tape breakages. To increase the length of beta tapes the tape has to be made thinner. Beta tapes also had more turns wound inside the case. Both these things made beta tapes more prone to breakages than vhs.
Plus, dont forget the different modes for VHS (LP + SP) for quality vs recording time
Just discovered your show! Excellent content and superb presentation😀👍🎶
nice info. how did u shoot this video? rendering? sound recording? did u learn by heart or had a monitor ro read from.?
Always wondered about this. Thanks for sharing. I remember in 1980, my father and I went to Argos (a catalogue shop in the UK) and purchased two blank VHS cassettes which cost £20 for both. That was more than half a week's wages for the average worker! A pint of beer in a public house was around 47p (I grew up in a pub you see). A pint of pub beer in the UK now is around £4. That would make one single video cassette around £100 today which, by my maths means beer has never been so affordable. I'll drink to that!
That's good you pointed out that early ownership of VHS or Beta really upped the expense when it came to blank tapes.
The early era of VHS tapes in the US were expensive, at around $10 ~ $15 (US) each.
I recall when I got hooked on recording TV shows by the late 1980s and building a video library, that standard or high-grade VHS tapes could be gotten as low as $2 ~ $3 (US) each when the big-box retailers had ad promotion sales of them in multi-packs, generally three or four cassettes per pack.
I remember my cousin telling me when I was young 'if you ever see a VCR with piano keys buy it'. Exactly like the two machines you have, according to him the very early machines 'piano key' had no copy protection.
Also have to hand it to Sony they do innovate. They must have released so many formats; minidisk, blueray, Betamax and I'm sure there are a few more. I think they were also responsible for portable tape players. What they done in the console market was amazing. The PlayStation was originally just a cd add on for the snes I bet Nintendo are still kicking themselves for backing out. If they stuck with Sony who knows Sega might still be around, Microsoft may have stayed out of the console market. Who knows but one thing is for sure, I'm glad they did. The ps1 is probably the best console ever released, it's library is huge and for any fan of j-rpg's the ps1 console is one you should have.
I sure like going off topic!
Thanks for the clip.
Yes, Sony did create the first portable cassette player, called the Walkman. They did not create Blu-Ray though, that was made by a group of companies, that did include Sony, however. You could say the PS3 really made it popular though.
My first VCR was one of those big, heavy machines with the pop-up tape deck. Mine was a Panasonic and although big & heavy, it was one great machine in it's day. I bought it used from a co-worker for $200. I also bought a newer, smaller machine of the period and would use the large VCR to copy legit movies because it didn't have that damned copy protection thingy and it worked great for that purpose. I sold it a couple years later for exactly what I paid for it ($200). By then there were new VCR's being marketed that would defeat current copy protection methods.
Gunzee None of the video recorders had copy protection. The way manufacturers stopped their tapes from being copied was by encoding their tapes with a signal that confused the auto-brightness which is incorporated into all video recorders
+chris2442uk Exactly right. Macrovision was introduced in 1983 (I think)and manufacturers had to, by law, make new machines so that the copy protected content would confuse the AGC of the recorder causing the brightness of the recording to go up and down and even confuse the motor servos . Macrovision essentially inserted fake video lines inside the vertical blanking section to mess with the AGC. Pre 1983 VCR's didn't process the AGC in the same way so they were immune to Macrovision.
+Gunzee Sony innovates (at least used to) to try and corner a market and force consumers to buy their proprietary products. They weren't too successful. I'm not giving you BluRay as that was a combined effort by various manufacturers. You forgot the memorystick.
I like the fact that this video explained it in a few minutes instead of 30-45 minutes like so many other videos.
He speaks so clearly and not too fast. This is a welcome relief for someone like me, who has a severe hearing problem.
And The Award for Best VCR of the 80s goe's to...
:Drum roll:
V2000 !
"Goes" does not need an apostrophe.
yes the phillips vcc with autoreturn and digital recording was the top tape video recorder ever made
One point that bears mentioning is that Beta survived for quite a while as a professional format as Betacam SP. It was used mostly by TV stations and TV commercials, but it survived long after Beta was forgotten in the consumer market. Once things started going digital, DigiBeta came around around, which was digital video stored on tape, but it failed to make much of a dent. Things then moved to solid state (i.e., SD and compact flash cards) rather quickly after that, which is where they are today, though some outfits use the Sony digital Professional Disc, which goes with its XDCam system. We use both where I work.
"it failed to make much of a dent"
Like heck it didn't! Digital Betacam was the high end format of choice for many production companies. Released in the year 1993, it had a good lifespan. High definition video production is the main reason it went out of style.
“Betacam” and “Betamax” are not the same. The physical tapes are the same but the technical specs are entirely different. Tapes recorded in one can physically fit in the other, but neither can be played in the other. Betacam could only record 20 minutes of footage on a tape that would hold 2 hours on a Betamax machine - Hence the broadcast quality. The only similarity between the two is the physical tape.
I miss my old 1970 vintage Sansui stereo system. And Dual 501 turntable and Advent cassette deck. Oh, the Infinity speakers, too.
This is the 11th most important video on RUclips.
Excellent. The thing I remembered that hurt Betamax (I owned one) was Sony made the format proprietary, while VHS was “open”. Many manufacturers could make VHS machines and pushed the price and size down even further, and quality improved. Sony still makes the same mistake today with their technologies and still loses these battles because of it, ie the memory stick.
The PS2 was an exception to that and was very successful. It was just "good enough" but weakest in it's gen.
I've still got my beta recorder; boxed up in the garage. Haven't seen it in 20 years.
how do you know its still there then?
Strange you should say that Dave, As far as I can tell, the MFs who broke into my garage a month ago only stole my lawn mower, ,my snow blower, my hedger trimmer, leaf blower and weed wacker. I think my Beta is still in there somewhere.
thanks for the heads-up, and say hello to Quark for me.
resisting her is futile
Michael Powell Hoi .Then i do let you know i
bought and got a lot of recorders Betamax .2000
and VHS for museum purpose.The problem is i only
and still pay storage rent for 9 years.The city hall people and 3rd mayor dont care .harmsaudio.@gmail.com
I bought my last VCR in 2001. I never bought a DVD recorder because cable and satellite companies had introduced their digital recorders. The latest DVR I got in 2013 can record four programmes at the same time while watching a fifth. Now the newest DVR can record six programmes at the same while watching a seventh, and now you can watch your recordings anywhere on your device when it's connected to Internet.
I was a kid when the rental boom of the early 80s happened. I knew a few people who had beta, but most people definitely had VHS. Also, I still remember the small video stores...at the time, they'd all have a tiny beta section and VHS dominated.
Everybody always seems to forget about poor old video 2000.
+spankmeister I had a Phillips Video 2000 - excellent recorder. I believe they were purely European so destined to fail in a Global market.
The Video2000 was _truely_ the best system. It was a technical miracle. a) Video heads were following the track, via piezo servos. That improved quality in general and picture quality during fast forward/rewind, slow motion and freeze frame in particular. b) The cassettes could be turned around, so you had 2 x 4 h maximum recording time. c) The spooling motors (?) were servo driven, with optical encoders. After inserting a cassette, and some minimum spooling, you had a real time position of the tape, calculated from the difference in revolutions and rhe size of the cassette. These are only 3 of the innovations, way way ahead of either VHS or Betamax...
+spankmeister yup, true. sometimes i think that phillips is cursed. they invented so much good stuff that never caught on. if i were them, id given up
Ever heard about the CD or the compact cassette? Both (partly) invented by Philips.
Yep, I second that, our household had purely V2000 (first a Grundig 2x4 Super, until it literally wore out, then a Philips VR2020 as the format was dying out) - we didn't go VHS until NICAM Stereo and Dolby Pro Logic was a thing. Even then, the top-of-the-range VHS recorder I got still couldn't picture search without some noise bars. V2000 could do it perfect. Shame Europe was only place it really was moderately popular, until the steamroller of VHS killed it off about the same time as Betamax (in the UK at least)
When the adult entertainment industry adopted the VHS format, the Beta-Max format died. It was the adult entertainment industry that was the first profitable business on the internet.
This is an example of "If you repeat a falsehood enough times, it eventually becomes fact."
I grew up in my grandfather's Radio Shack store. I watched the battle first hand. What we saw at the time was the victory of "open source" over "proprietary". Only Sony made their cassettes and players; they allowed nobody else to do so. VHS licensed their technology to anybody who wanted to make it, both cassette and player manufacturers. It was a beautiful lesson in economics. It created massive competition among the various VHS manufacturers to continually innovate and refine their products, the first major consequence of which was lower and lower prices year over year. Yes they made deals with major rental companies as explained here, but that was just the final nail in the coffin. Rental companies like Block Buster wanted more VHS on their shelves because of customer demand for VHS.
Why did you show that Elmo film projector while talking about video tape machines?
My very first VCR was that Sony BetaMax and it was awesome. It was $1600.00 and the only place where I could buy movies was from Hollywood Video in California. That was a long time ago and the first movie that I bought was "Enter The Dragon" Bruce Lee movie.
nostalgia, this is awesome, great content!
😩Felt the feels when the shot of That’s Rentertainment showed up! Browsed/rented at the 6th St. store (shown) and Lincoln Ave. many times. A by-gone part of campustown life at UIUC...😭
I would also love for you to make a video like this discussing 8 tracks and cassette tapes.
That was great stuff. I was lucky enough to own a electronics store from 1977-1995. So right about the Beta having a better picture and it’s also recorded audio on the right and left side of the tape, opposed to the VHS audio being embedded in the tape. This made the Betamax a excellent 2 track audio recorder. Thank you for the memories.
Beta = 💩
Have you ever seen a mechanism which threads the tape around the video head drum? It's a nightmare for tape.
Edit: who back then had a need for stereo sound when most CRT TVs have only one - left?
@@danek_hren FM radio stations. My Father owned 7 in South Louisiana.
@@theshadowtalks even then, if you look at some of the radios around that time - not new! - they have one speaker OR output mono.
@@danek_hren Every FM factory installed radio (Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge etc.) all had two channels. Same for home “stereo” systems.
Years ago I bought a Betamax, good product, top of the line. Experts said it was better than a VHS.
Turned out to be a complete waste of time and money
Let it go!
@@TheBurntLemon Absurd opinion,intolerant guy.
Remember those early video rental days all too well. My local video shop had one tiny little corner dedicated to Beta... and that was it. Most of the (admitedly few) Beta tape we rented were forgetable films, though I vauguely remember Conan the Barbarian and Superman III, both of which were Thorn EMI titles in the U.K. Unlike other companies, I think they put a bit more effort into the Betamax rental market, but the big studios didn't seem to care... I vividly remember going over a neighbor's house just so we could watch Return of the Jedi, when it was released on VHS in 1986 ; I was three years old at the time.
I had a JVC almost like that one... Probably a few years newer, but I distinctly remember the harsh pop up of that hatch. At the end of that vhs-player's life span the lid on the hatch - the actual top cover - had come lose from the mechanism. So every time I pushed to open it I needed to remember to keep a finger on the lid - when I forgot to do that the lid just catapulted right out into the room!
It still amazes me from time to time, that I once put worn out VHS tapes with illegally copied horrible quality movies in that machine, which was hooked up to a 15in black-and-white lump of a television (both machines together probably weighing in at somewhere between 60-80lbs)....and today I open up Netflix on my comparatively miniscule phone and cast a high quality image film straight onto my 65in flatscreen tv...
Technology moves so fast it boggles the mind!!
“People thought it would come down to pixel rate or refresh rate, and they're pretty much the same. What it came down to was a combination between gamers and porn. Now, whichever format porno backs is usually the one that becomes the uh most successful. But, you know, Sony, every PlayStation 3 has a Blu-ray in it.” Kevin, Tropic Thunder
and expect heavier controls on that in s0ny`s latest generations of tech, through the censoring at source that they do now.
You made a lot of good points. But from my understanding Sony only let two other companies make Beta Max machines. I believe Sanyo and Toshiba. I could be wrong.
JVC let anyone make a VHS VCR as long as you paid for the license.
The only thing I did not like about JVC is that they removed the four hour recording mode called LP and only had SP and EP also EP is the same as SLP. But JVC would play back VHS tapes in LP but you get a black screen when you fast forward.
Yup, you are correct
Yes, it boiled down to a question of numbers. Sony limited the number of manufactures licensed to build Beta machines, whereas Japan Victor Corporation let anyone & their uncle build VHS machines for a small royalty. Ironically, Sony developed both tape formats, & then sold the rights to the lesser quality VHS system to JVC, since the Beta system offered better video quality and a better tape transport system. After a couple of years, there were a heck of a lot more VHS machines in homes than were Beta. Rental stores ( you could not really buy pre-recorded movies back then) went from carrying movie titles in both formats to eventually just carrying them only in VHS. I remember families having huge libraries of home made tapes. It's hard to believe, but folks used to put their VCRs in the shop years ago to have the tape heads professionally cleaned & serviced. Eventually the machines got so cheap (in quality too) that you just threw them away & bought a new disposable player if you had issues with your old one.
Zenith marketed sony made beta vcrs for several years. NEC had beta vcrs for a time too.
Man this sure brings back a lot of memories. I remember the original VCR recording settings, *SP-LP-EP* (EP was sometimes labelled *ELP*). I always preferred recording in *SP* because it provided the best quality but took longer to skip through commercials. Cheaper VCR's did indeed go to a black screen when fast-forward searching. Back in the mid 90's I bought the absolute best Sony VCR featuring a flying erase head, a feature only found on the most expensive VCR's, which was great for video editing. Cost me $500 at the time but was well worth it. Sony also had some low-end cheap, shitty VCR's too.
mp4podcastDOTcom I live in France and I distinctly remember my father buying a special VHS cassette to clean our machine. You would put it inside and play it and it would do the trick. When was a kid I always wondered how that worked. In fact ... I still do. I just hope my memory isn't playing tricks on me and maybe I'm mixing different memories together I don't know.
The guy running the Technology Connections channel says that another reason VHS recorders were initially more popular was that they better supported the idea of time-shifting (watching TV shows when you wanted, not when they were broadcast).
Time-shifting was aided by two things: recording time and ease of programming. VHS cassettes were larger that Betamax cassettes, meaning they could hold more tape, which translated into longer recording times. VHS recorders had versatile timers that made it possible to program the recording of several TV shows (with complex schedules) in advance. Sony lagged badly in these areas.
I could listen to bill talk all day, he's so captivating....keep up the good work!😀😀😀
I remember when my video store hung a little handmade sign that said VHS ONLY.
Commie
VHS won because it could store a greater length of video, enough for an entire movie.
Which made it more profitable for studios to sell movies on VHS tapes than Beta
The weight factor was also important when video stores would rent the machines out to customers who did not own a videotape player, which were relatively expensive when they first hit the market.
Saw a Betamax in a customer's home in '79 while working with my father-in-law who was a Master Electrician. I couldn't quite wrap my head around the concept of recording TV shows back then; it seemed so utterly futuristic. Wouldn't be until October 1983 that my wife and I bought a Fisher Studio Standard 4 Head VHS stereo VCR. I wish I'd kept better track of what happened to the two boxes of home recordings (with commercials most importantly!) when we moved in 2003. Those tapes were all lost to time.
Per the Urban Dictionary: betamaxed --- When a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better marketed competition.
Must apply to virtually every Apple product then. A lot of good products were Betamaxed by Apple. The first Ipod mp3 players had dreadful sound quality but they dominated the market.
@@jamesshunt5123 or you could in theory, not get up in arms about it
VHS did have a few advantages
One of the big ones was the length of programs it could record
should be replaced by playstationed
@@jamesshunt5123 indeed. The Mediocre Tech/High Cost ratio continues.
Brilliant thank you ...I remember my brother buying a Sony and could we find Betamax tape rental ...never
Having grown up with heaps of video cassettes, I'm astonished at how robust they were. Me and my siblings were anything but gentle with them, yet there were almost no physical failures.
Not only were the tape cassettes durable, but they were forgiving if there were flaws or dropouts with the recordings; as such imperfections didn't stop the recording to continue playing. Compare that to DVD/Blu-Ray where a minor flaw on the digital playing surface would render the recording unplayable.
@@bloqk16 About failures in video signal. I don't know exactly why but my Panasonic NV-SR55 unit when recording on PAL it sometimes has a bit unstable picture and loses color. It has 2 heads. I don't know if this phenomenon is caused by cheap cassette or maybe heads need cleaning but you got the point. Also, I think that it was THE CHEAPEST VCP that was somewhere and my cheap-lovely father bought it. It has only one timer: how long to record for. With 30 minutes intervals. Yeah. Much, MUCH worse than RCA VDT-600 from 1975-76! Technology here is degrading!
I would like to see you do a video explaining how a (analog) watt hour meter works. I've watched a couple vids about it, but some things were left in question.
There's a lot of "conflicted noise" about Sony originally forbidding pornographic content in the Betamax license, which could fall under your assertion "relationships" forged by JVC.
There is a lot of inconsistency as to whether this is true or not (or to what degree), but it is oft-cited as to how Betamax failed.
Another thing not cited is Betamax originally supported "Hi-fi Stereo"- a feature which came later as a premium to VHS.
***** Yes. My earliest use of VHS (circa 1983-84) was renting and copying VHS tapes with my neighbor.
Later on, I used VHS timers and the audio inputs to record "scheduled" radio programs, e.g. Howard Stern and others, I could listen to at my leisure. (I still consider the advantage of this from time-to-time and am considering re-investing into "VCR for Radio.")
I also used the extended play functionality to record "mix audio tapes" of music that could run for up to 6 hours. I was quick to notice the 1/2" video tape had superior sound quality to cassettes. (Even when writable CD's came along, this was somewhat easier to manage and initially preferable, until .mp3 CD's.)
"Perfection is the enemy of good enough" -Old Russian proverb
Russia in WWII in a nutshell.
"Perfect is the enemy of good... or more literally, "the best is the enemy of the good," Not "good enough", ya knob.
@RKG Austin - That's exactly why Russia lost the race to the moon.
@@TheNYgolfer Yet did everything else first...
No mention of the off axis spin of the drum which allowed diagonal striping of the recording which packed more signal on the tape, think of it like diagonal parking vs parallel parking.
Great to find your post U of I guy!
Bought my first Betamax machine from August Systems in Champaign around 1984 or 85. Thanks for the well-done video. I-L-L!!
My step-dad won a Betamax at his companies Christmas party in the late 70s. He couldn't find any place "near by" that had a wide selection of movies, but could get tapes to record tv shows. It was neat for it's time. I got a few Betamax tapes for my birthday so I could record stuff like Saturday morning cartoons to watch during the week. Yes that was a big deal then lol
Company's. Nearby, without quotation marks. He. Its. , .
My teacher told me betamax lost because there was no porn for it.
+Eien no Yami
So i heard the story too.
That's the "rental market" angle.
RonJohn63
What does that mean?
***** Porn was a big part of the rental market.
It's little known that there actually was a Beta format machine designed especially for porn. It had chroma circuits designed to enhance flesh tones, and somewhat higher resolution. Though it never really caught on, some of us old timers still remember it - the infamous Master Betamax.
What about Philips' Video 2000? What is your opinion on that format? Of course it lost the competion due to late arrival to markets, but it did have really innovative features
There were so many reasons Beta lost to VHS, and one of them was simply Sony, Zenith, and Toshiba(?), the three main makers of Beta machines COMBINED weren't as big a company as Panasonic, who made most of the early VHS machines was alone. And Panasonic pretty much made every single part in a VHS machine in house, so costs were kept low. Back in the mid 70's, RCA was still a huge company and when they allied with Panasonic, JVC, and all the rest in the VHS camp, it was kind of like WWII, the Axis vs the Allies was a lost cause for the Axis by economics alone, and the longer it went on, the odds got worse. When I went looking for a VCR, I went to a friend who was a service tech at a local dealer. He had tons of both Beta and VHS decks in for repair. The difference was the VHS decks mostly were in for replacement of a light bulb that was used to detect the end of a tape. A simple fix, and I eventually did the repair myself later on, and the Beta decks were mostly in for eating tapes. That, and the longer record times, pushed me to VHS.Eventually, I had six machines, all but one made by Panasonic, that one was made by Hitachi. My original RCA(Pana made) still works! It weighs just about 37 pounds and has a lot of steel in it. Toshiba didn't learn their lesson from the tape format wars and went down to defeat again with HD-DVD. This time, Sony picked the winning side.
I wonder what happened to all the machines that mass recorded VHS. There was a time where VHS seemed like it will be with humanity forever
I have a few. People throw them away.
show me a picture
I have a couple of machines,too,but I have no idea why.
Although he's right about all those points, it does miss one critical misstep that Sony has actually made over and over: refusal to license their technology. JVC licensed the VHS technology to all sorts of manufacturers, which is why (eventually) you could buy a JVC/Panasonic/Philips/Magnavox/Whoever VHS machine, while you could still only buy a Betamax from Sony. That competition in the market drove down the price of VHS players and tapes, so VHS also became the clear cost winner. Critical mistake on Sony's part. Interestingly, Beta *did* take a foothold in broadcast and video *production* and was the go-to standard for TV stations and professional videographers for *years*.
TV stations and video editing suites used.Betacam (along with variants like SP, SX and Digi). Gen 1 Betacam and Betamax were cross compatible since the the tape was ferro-oxide based but SP onwards used metal-based tape which was too abrasive to be used in consumer decks.
Who can still remember "ultra slow mode" where you could record up to 8 hours on a 240 minute tape, albeit with a slight drop in audio & video quality - thát was AWESOME!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Remember well when dad brought it home. It was still there when the vhs was brought home too and set on top of it.