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Videotape format war -

History -

Competing technologies -

Market share -

The End of Betamax

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Videotape format war

The videotape format war was a period of an intense format war of rival incompatible models of video cassette recorders in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has gone in marketing history as the classic example of this kind of market competition.

Home video cassette recorders became available in the early 1970s, though the first system to be successful was Sony's Betamax. This was quickly followed by VHS (Video Home System) from JVC, and later by Video 2000 from Philips.

History

Sony had demonstrated a prototype system to the other electronics manufacturers in 1974, and expected that they would back a single format for the good of all. But JVC in particular decided to go with its own format (despite Sony's appeal to the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry) and the classic format war began.

This is a historic photo of the actual press conference announcing the worlds first Betamax VCR. Sony's Ibuka is holding a Betamax tape in his right hand  and to highlight how compact the new format was is also holding a 2-inch reel to reel broadcast tape in his left hand).

Competing technologies

The first battleground was recording time. The original Betamax systems could record for a maximum of one hour, which was not enough for a whole feature film. VHS could manage two hours, due to larger cassettes and slower tape speed; Sony responded with the "BII" speed which allowed for longer recording time at the expense of recording quality, quickly replacing "BI" as the default speed. Thinner tape allowed both formats to increase still further, and by the early 1980s Beta could record for 3 hours and 15 minutes, compared to 3 hours for VHS. With Long Play (LP) technology (available by the mid-80s), a VHS cassette could run for up to 8 hours.

Betamax offered a slightly higher horizontal resolution (250 vs 240 lines for PAL), lower video noise, and less luma-chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was marketed as providing superior pictures to VHS. In practice however VHS picture quality was very similar to that from Beta, as the actual picture performance depended on other factors including the condition or quality of the tape, and individual video recorder models.

Market share

When home VCRs started to become popular in the UK, the main issue was one of availability and price. VHS machines were available through the high street rental chains such as Radio Rentals and DER, while Beta was seen as the more upmarket choice for people who wanted quality and were prepared to buy it. By 1980, out of an estimated 100,000 homes with VCRs, 70% were rented, and the presence of two competing formats meant that rental was an even more attractive choice, since one didn't have to worry about spending a fortune (about £2000 in today's prices) on a system which was going to become obsolete.

Within Europe there were three choices by 1980, with the arrival of the Video 2000 format from Philips and Grundig. Although featuring technology that was ahead of its time, V2000 took longer to develop and arrived late on the scene. Players were found to be less reliable than their VHS and Beta counterparts, and the format never gained substantial market share. V2000 was cancelled in 1985, the first casualty of the format war.

By the time Betamax machines became easier to rent, VHS had already claimed 70% of the market. At the same time tape rentals were beginning to become popular, and for a while it seemed that every little shop on the street-corner had a rack of tapes. In Britain the famous "video nasties" - films which were deemed too violent or gruesome for general release - were also highly sought, since they couldn't be seen anywhere else but on video.

Yet again Sony missed the boat, being reluctant to sign licensing agreements with studios to have films made available in Betamax. Betamax's combination of lower market share and a lack of software both strengthened VHS's hand, and gradually the public turned away from Beta. In 1983 the top selling video recorder in the UK was the Sanyo Beta VTC5000. 1984 was Beta's best year with a 25% market share, but by 1986 it was down to 7.5% and the writing was on the wall.

The End of Betamax

Sales dwindled away and VHS emerged victorious - despite being the least sophisticated of the three main rivals. VHS however 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, making the format war largely academic by the turn of the 1990s.

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 Japanese 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', which, predictably, indicates 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. Despite the many improvements in VHS for home use, Beta technology remained at a higher quality and continues to be used to this day in the broadcast industries in the form of BetacamSP, BetacamSX and Digibeta. This is only now beginning to be made obsolete by direct hard drive storage of digital video in high definition formats like HDV (High Definition Video) at previously unheard of resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

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