Why vhs won betamax

And more importantly, did a company really try and sell us a video tape that you could turn over? Phil Rhodes starts a two part series delving into the murky world of recording formats that never made it. It seems somehow appropriate to be talking about archaic video media formats at a time when physical media is on its way out.

But in the mid-to-late 70s, video tape recording was becoming less a piece of high-end esotera and more a mainstream technology, and the consumer market was one everyone was keen to dominate.

Beta fought VHS; Beta was better, VHS won, and everyone in the know spent the next three decades being professionally gloomy about it while steaming up the window in front of an impossibly expensive Laserdisc player.

To wit, has anyone ever heard of Cartrivision? Promoted with casual chauvinism in the early 70s, it involved chunky six by seven inch cartridges an inch and a half thick, containing two stacked reels of half-inch tape.

It was, frankly, pretty dismal from a technical standpoint: displaying each frame three times, it worked at ten frames per second. Modern references suggest Cartrivision lasted about a year, possibly because it was available only as an integrated television-recorder system that cost a lot of money. VCR, too, was a child of the 70s in that it looked like a giant 8-track cartridge which required both hands to lift, and it also failed because it cost as much as a small car.

There are other, even more obscure early systems we could talk about. When you get a new tool, you want to apply it, and I applied it. I'd spent half a decade deriding Microsoft Windows - as a user, I'd preferred Digital Research's Gem, and I was a keen supporter of open systems Unix - but it didn't take me long to work out that Windows had won. VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on.

All of this matched my own experience. I remember perambulating Hammersmith doing the Maplin run and finding VHS recorders more readily available to rent, while the video shop had three walls of VHS movies and only one for Betamax. Indeed, the main thing that didn't fit was the idea was that Betamax was "technically superior". Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that VHS's quality was superior.

I "knew" Betamax was superior -- that was the received wisdom, even at the time - and maybe it was, in a lab. But I wasn't buying a lab test rig. In terms of "the whole product", VHS was clearly superior, so that's the way I went. Along with everybody else. Later I found out that Betamax had owned the market, but lost it because Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours.

Instead of poring over the sound and picture quality, reviewers could simply have taken the systems home. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it. All of the video machines in use and all of the pre-recorded movies were Betamax. It had a de facto monopoly, and an element of lock-in because of tape incompatibilities. It lost because, at the time, it could not do what consumers wanted: record a whole movie unattended.

And although Betamax playing times were extended, they never caught up with VHS. Betamax, owned by Sony, controlled everything about the technology which made it prohibitively expensive. VHS on the other hand belonged to the people. Its prices were dramatically lower than Betamax, and even though it was a worse technology, it won the format war. Much less violently, in the days of video tape players, it was the same thing: Betamax and VHS.

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