How Sony's Betamax lost to JVC's VHS Cassette Recorder

[missyevitt]

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.

[TheBitGuy]

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.

[chadharmon]

Anyone else remember the remote with a 50ft cord that plugged into the vcr?

[Jin-Ro]

Legend has it that my dad is still trying to set the timer.

[SirCrest]

I was kind of disappointed you didn't go into more details about how they work, but still nice to see a new video.

[tcpnetworks]

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...

[andyl]

Two hour versus one hour tapes. In my book at least, that says everything I need to know when making my decision.

[aaronlowe]

"The winner is usually the one that's just good enough"
Wow that's a really good way of thinking of it.

[joshgiesbrecht]

You're able to explain extremely complicated mechanisms as simple as the ABC's. I love it. You're a good layman's teacher

[venuspluto]

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.

[efp]

I could listen to this guy read a phone book and still be entertained

[XFileWrightonite]

The fact he used a Star Trek cassette in the demo - PERFECT !

[Barry]

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.

[reelblack]

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.

[rdhorsey]

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.

[GAG]

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".

[kierank]

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!

[appalachiangunman]

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.

[Petertronic]

Clever marketing will beat technical quality every time. Look at Apple.

[channel]

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!