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MARCH 2 VHS TECHNICAL DETAILS : THE END OF BETA
Beta sales dwindled away and VHS emerged as the winner of the format war. 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. Sony seemed to have misjudged the home video market. JVC quickly licensed its VHS technology and just about every major consumer electronics company of the era (JVC, Panasonic, RCA, Magnavox, Quasar, Zenith, et al.) had their own brand of VCR and at a significantly lower retail price, due in part to high competition among the brands, than the Betamax. Sony believed that the 1-hour length of their current Umatic format would be sufficient for Betamax too. However, Umatic was primarily a professional standard with constant surveillance by television technicians and which did not need more than one hour length per tape. For home usage, one hour would not be enough to record an evening of primetime programming, or Monday Night Football. Therefore, consumers naturally flocked to the 4-hour "Long Play" VCRs offered by RCA and Matsushita in 1976. Further driving the VHS format was its inherent 2 hour playback time (SP speed) - a much better fit for Hollywood movies than Betamax's 1-hour limitation. This event spawned the huge video rental business that flourished in the 1970s and 80s. Being able to watch Hollywood movies at home was a major innovation that transformed consumer habits and allowed people to see older "classic" films that had been buried in the vaults for years. What Sony did not take into account was what the consumers wanted. While consumers did perceive Sony and the Betamax to be superior and preferred to purchase a Betamax, due to brilliant marketing by Sony, consumers wanted an affordable VCR (a VHS often cost hundreds of dollars less than a Betamax), but Sony believed that having better quality recordings was the key to success, and that consumers would be willing to pay the higher retail price for it, whereas it soon became clear that consumer desire was focused more intently on recording time, lower retail price, compatibility with other machines for sharing (as VHS was becoming the format in the majority of homes), brand loyalty to other than Sony, and compatibility for easy transfer of information. In addition, Sony, being the first producer to offer their technology, also thought it would establish Betamax as the leading format. This kind of lock-in and path dependence failed for Sony, but succeeded brilliantly for JVC. For thirty years JVC dominated the home market with their VHS, Super VHS, and VHS-Compact formats and collected billions in royalty payments. The video recording market was an unknown when VCRs first came on the market; as such, Sony and JVC were both developing technologies that were unproven. As a result of the desire to get into the marketplace faster, the firms both spent less time on research and development, and tried to save money by picking a version of the technology they thought would do best without really exploring all the options. 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 North America. In parts of South America and in Japan Beta continued to be popular and was still in production up to the end of 2002. 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 digital or high-definition tape recordings.
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