Posted on 08/27/2002 1:00:21 PM PDT by babaloo999
TOKYO (AP) - Sony closed the final chapter of its legendary battle with Victor Co. of Japan to dominate the home
video machine market, when it announced Tuesday that it would discontinue its Betamax VCRs.
Sony will stop manufacturing Betamax machines by year's end as the company refocuses its efforts on DVD and other
technologies now dominating the market, Sony spokeswoman Shoko Yanagizawa said.
The announcement marks the end of a 27-year run, during which the fabled brand sold 18 million units worldwide in
a race against VHS technology from its archrival Victor Co., which is also known as JVC, to set the video format standard.
Betamax was first to market, hitting stores in 1975 and peaking with global sales of 2.3 million units in 1984.
But the decision not to share its technology with rival companies proved to be Sony's fatal mistake.
In a classic case of the underdog winning the race, VHS -short for "video home system" - had clearly won the battle
by the mid-1980s. The technology used now in millions of video recorders around the world is JVC's.
While the war between competing standards is ensconced in business lore - with many die-hard fans still debating the
pros and cons of the two technologies - Yanagizawa blamed the decision to halt production on the new era of DVDs and
other advanced digital technologies that are making the videocassette obsolete.
Even for JVC, videocassette technology is losing its luster. The company lost money two of the last three fiscal years
and is forecasting losses for the year that ended March 31.
Overseas production of the Betamax ground to a halt in 1998. In Japan, Sony produced just 2,800 units in 2001.
So, in a fit of marketing non-expertise, IBM didn't port any of their apps to it.
In short, they didn't eat their own dogfood and drink their own Kool-Aid.
Cool. I am told that many banks still run their apps on OS/2 and also that many ATM's run OS/2 as well.
A guy I know who's been looking at the computing scene since the days of the IMSAI Altair 8080 described Microsoft vs. Everyone Else as being rather like Operation Desert Storm: Microsoft did nothing important wrong while their opposition did nothing at all right.
That's why business types have zero respect for engineers. They know people are stupid enough to create a market for rubber dog sheet and fake vomit.
Why bother getting it right when you know you can sell anything?
Back to the future with discs. Well recordable [DVD] discs. Or so says all the spam email I get.
???????
Porn tapes were out on Betamax and VHS in the early days.
I wonder it that was the problem with laser discs?
Nope. Again, porn was available on laserdisc.
I remember the demo tape that came with the Beta Hi-Fi machine, too. It had the Ride of the Valkries scene from Apocalypse Now, as well as a bunch of other stuff to show off the audio quality. There was a copy of an *old* (the first?) music video by Mike Nesmith on the tape, IIRC. It was an effective demo tape, though; it really blew the customers away.
I spent an awful lot of time on the phone, telling customers how to hook the things up.
Harley vs Honda...
I read an article about Sony fighting the porn industry tooth & nail. Maybe they caved in when they saw the sales figures of porn tapes.
CEDs were like a record (and came in a white plastic casing that unloaded inside the machine). They were played with a stylus and thus were degenerative everytime they played.
CED spet a misconception in the minds of early LD buyers.
The biggest complaint that I heard about laserdiscs from those who would not buy one was "can't record on it" (aka "I don't buy movies, I just rent them/tape").
Even when digital sound, original aspect ratio, higher resolution, multi-audio (commentary track), alternate footage releases were coming out on LD, it was considered a high brow niche market.
DVD came along with a rapidly dropping price structure (even today many movies cost less than a CD) to grow the market base. And suddenly everyone is a film buff, an expert on the improvements, etc.
Some deny it but laserdisc was thrown on the dustbin of technology to avoid market confusion with DVD. Image Entertainment folded their LD/DVD catalog (which was an industry adzine available for free at video stores) when the DVD manufacturers were complaining about the potential confusion caused by listing some titles that were format exclusive (jealousy more like, "Why can't I get that title in my format?").
Industrial use of LD continued as DVD went through the market (stores and presentations continued on LD).
I still prefer it to the goofy menu system, region coding, macrovision, and control blockouts (forcing you to watch studio fanfares, copyright notices, etc.).
> Same for Amiga vs. PC.YES!! Trust me, nobody, and I mean nobody, not OS/2 Warp guys, not Mac heads, not Linux kiddies will ever approach the fire of an Amiga advocate.
Nice try. But, even with the aid of Federal market intervention, I don't see H-D running Honda out of business anytime soon. ;-)
Yep...another analogous painring: IBM's SNA (System Network Architecture) was vastly superior to the freely available TCP/IP networking protocols, which is why ATMs could be made reiable and relatively cheaply with PCs running 16-bit OS/2 and Communications Manager/2 (the SNA implementation for OS/2).
I've even seen experiments that show that you can encapsulate TCP/IP traffic onto an SNA network then parse it out at the end (thus incurring overhead) AND STILL handle more traffic on your network than you can with a pure TCP/IP network.
But IBM (and Sony, and maybe Microsoft one day?) with their proprietary ways...don't even get me started on Microchannel Architecture!
I don't know exactly how the technical details of Betacam and Betamax compare, though I've been told that mechanically they're identical or nearly so. Betacam IIRC splits the video into Y:U:V components and stores the Y component at double speed followed by the U and V components at 4x speed (so each scan line still takes up 63.6us worth of tape). I don't know what Betamax does. VHS separates out the Y:U:V components and then amplitude-modulates the U and V on top of the Y using different carrier frequencies (NTSC broadcast video amplitude-modulates U and V at the same frequency, 90 degrees out of phase; VHS does not do this, because preserving the necessary phase relationships would require a tape transport with less than 50ns of jitter).
At least from what I understand they avoided the "interrupt" bottleneck that has plagued every other PC bus before or since, up to and including PCI.
It was strictly experimental stuff that I saw when I was at IBM. They were looking for ways to get people to notice that SNA is a better way to network.
That's my point. MCA was awesome. Shared interrupts, 32-bit ahead of its day, streaming mode that could transfer 64 bits at a time (using the address bus pins as more data)...but totally bungled by IBM.
Are there any features of the Microchannel architecture which would have made it impossible to design a "compatibility" slot?
I don't know the details, but I do know that in practice they're not that much alike. First of all, Betacam tapes are broadcast quality, and it takes extremely expensive (and heavy) camera and recorders/players to use them. Second, the tapes themselves are nothing alike. Betacam tapes are at least three time bigger than regular VHS tapes, and probably six times bigger than original home Betamax tapes. They also weigh much much more. Once you've worked at a TV network for more than a couple of weeks, you'll inevitably grab a VHS tape to watch and practically have it fly backwards out of your hand because you were instinctively expecting a huge Betacam tape. From that point on, VHS tapes look and feel like mere toys to you.
Not true.
Both started out with a standard consumer-style shell, which was loaded with premium tape and had special coding notches in the shell. In the case of Sony, they then engineered larger cassettes to hold more time, and machines with larger slots to accept the range of cassette sizes. Thus, the same basic format could be used for portable camcorder (ENG/EFP) work, spot/actuality insertion, and full-length program on-air origination.
The larger cassette was prompted by the fact that the tape ran at a higher linear speed, thus reducing the amount of time that could be stored in the original small cassette.
The reason for the higher linear speed was that more tracks were being laid down per frame of video; I believe in the case of Betacam it was two tracks, but it might have been three. The first track was strictly for luminance and the extra track(s) for wideband color info.
I guess some stations still run Betacam, at least those that got camcorders based on CCDs. But most everyone has gone to one of the (many) digital formats now. And, interestingly, the gap between full broadcast and ProSumer video (Mini-DV with Canon XL-1, for instance) is much narrower than it ever was in the analog days.
The main reason for going to a full professional tape format is to record the video with less compression, so the video will hold up through multiple generations of post production. And, of course, the top-of-the line camera/recorder meant for Hi-Def feature production might justify twenty-five times the investment in a ProSumer unit.
As for the consumer formats with Hi-Fi soundtracks, both Beta and VHS used a wideband compandered FM signal; but Beta had the advantage that their higher video carrier frequency allowed the new audio signal to be multiplexed through the same heads and recorded on the same tracks. VHS had no such luck; they had to resort to an additional pair of heads having azimuth at +/- 45 degrees to the video heads, and recording their audio physically deeper in the magnetic layer than the video.
By the time of the HiFi machines, however, VHS had already won the format war, so the simpler and more reliable Beta HiFi version didn't much help the viability of its host format.
The only thing I can think of is the fact that it was invented by IBM and IBM doesn't think of things like that. :-)
You beat me to it.
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