| End of Betamax
Betamax sales dwindled away and VHS emerged as the winner of the format war - despite being the least sophisticated of the three main rivals. VHS benefited from continuous development from multiple manufacturers (including Sony) over the years, and innovations such as high speed picture search, Hi-Fi stereo sound and fast-load tape mechanisms saw it keep pace with and eventually surpass Betamax.
When it became clear that Betamax had lost the video format war, controversy switched from which technology was better to why VHS had triumphed so completely. The video format war is now a highly scrutinized event in business and marketing history, leading to a plethora of market investigations into why betamax failed. As mentioned above Sony was first to release their format, but was followed only a year later by JVC and their affiliates. Sony being the first producer to offer their technology thought it would establish betamax as the leading format, this kind of lock-in and path dependance is exactly what economists point out as the betamax weak link (Liebowitz, 1995). What Sony didn't take into account was what the consumers wanted. Sony believed that having better quality recordings was the key to success, whereas it soon became clear that consumer desire was focused more intensly on recording time and compatibility for easy transfer of information (Besen, 1994). The video recording market was an unknown when VCR's first came on the market as such Sony and JVC were both developing technologies that were unproven. As a result in a desire to get into the market place faster the firms both spent less time on research and development and simply tried to save money by picking a version of the technology they thought would do best without really exploring all the options (Cowan, 1991). This is why there was more than one format on the market and why they continued to reinvent them with longer playing times and better quality.
In 1988 Sony began to market their own VHS machines, and despite claims that they were still backing Beta, it was clear that the format was dead -- at least in Europe and the U.S.. In parts of South America Beta continued to be popular, and in Japan the format was developed into ED-Beta and SuperBeta, and was still produced up to the end of 2002. The rise of DVD finally took away the niche market that Betamax had survived in during the 90s, giving the home format a total lifespan of 27 years.
Today, the only remaining aspect of the Betamax system is the slang term 'Betamaxed', used to describe something that had a brief shelf life and was quickly replaced by the competition. Despite the failure of Betamax, its technological successor, the Betacam tape, would become an industry standard for video recording, production and presentation, and continues to be used to this day, only now beginning to be supplanted by direct hard drive storage of video.
After the videotape format war the major electronics corporations agreed on a single standard for DVD in December 1995, but a format war resulted from a failure to agree on a single standard for DVD's high-definition successor in May 2005 [1].
Mythology
In recent years with the rise of a new format war, Bluray vs. HD-DVD, a new mythology regarding Betamax vs. VHS has emerged. Many mainstream news sources such as cnn.com often state that the adult entertainment (pornography) industry was the main reason VHS won, because VHS was supported by the adult studios while Betamax was shunned.[citation needed] This myth is no more true than any other urban legend.
First, a quick perusal of the Betamax library reveals that adult entertainment was readily available. For example, Playboy Industries released their videos in a dual format, both Betamax and VHS, for most of the 1980s (and can be confirmed with a quick search through Ebay's adult section, or other used video markets). The death of Betamax cannot be blamed on lack-of-support from adult entertainment.
Second, the adult industry is too small to have any lasting impact on standards selection. According to Forbes.com, videotape income ranges between $500 million to $1.8 billion. "The industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion)." The adult industry's impact on the Beta vs. VHS battle, and the current Bluray vs. HD-DVD battle, is minimal. (Link - http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html )
The outcome was decided by other more-important factors such as the availability of low-priced VHS clones, and longer home-recording times (upto 9 hours). |