True reason VHS beat betamax according to analyst

[hanugro]

Seems that Sony did not endorse porn content on betamax. Also seems that Sony repeat it again with blue-ray.

On the other hand seems that HD content also put presure for porn star. Every inperfection will be seen more clearly with HD. Seems that plastic surgery will be popular among them.

Taken from local media.

[edDV]

Why does this keep resurfacing?

VHS beat Betamax for reasons ...
PC beat Apple for reasons ...
Toyota beat GM for reasons ...
Boeing beat Airbus for reasons ...

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,881780,00.html

[hanugro]

Well, beats me . But one thing for sure (in case of blue-ray and HD-DVD) is because there are two different format just like beta and vhs. Customers want unified format (or at least unified players to play both format). We saw this is possible with DVD +&-. Fortunately, unlike beta and vhs that is physically incompatible, then it is wise that movie industry choose the same physical format to enable unified players to play both. It seems that even hollographic disc also physically compatible.

[TBoneit]

Yup, that would be what I need??, Want??? to see HD plastic surgery scars! Look around the TV shows and Movies at some of the grotesque enhancements. Demi Moore comes to mind along with Pamela Anderson. They looked 10 times better before the knife.

[hanugro]

Why does this keep resurfacing?

One more thing why I post it is that it is irony that porn industry that analyst said will be important factor in the battle is in fact not to enthusiast for HD after all. At least for the porn star.

BTW, those two things come from 2 seperate articles.

[Constant Gardener]

The reason I bought a VHS recorder (in 1979) was that it had the features I wanted, including the ability to record four events each on their own channel. No other player, regardless of format, would do that. Prerecorded media wasn't an issue.

What shocked me was when we replaced our 13" set with a 27". Suddenly my favorite stars showed details, not always to their advantage. Some people just look better when they're farther away.

[edDV]

Why does this keep resurfacing?

One more thing why I post it is that it is irony that porn industry that analyst said will be important factor in the battle is in fact not to enthusiast for HD after all. At least for the porn star.

BTW, those two things come from 2 seperate articles.

Are you saying people are demanding porn in HD? I think most prefer soft focus. Usually the softer the better.

[ZippyP.]

Usually the softer the better.

I think the opposite is true if you're in the adult movie business.

[edDV]

Usually the softer the better.

I think the opposite is true if you're in the adult movie business.

You think IMAX porn would sell?

[wulf109]

Actually porn was always available on beta. Beta lost because Sony introduced it as a one hour format,when it's natural use would be to record a two hour movie. They also foolishly introduced it as a console with the TV builtin. They never recovered from those marketing blunders.
It doesn't matter who wins the current DVD war,as neither format will ever be anything but minor niche formats. The average consumer didn't care about picture quality in the beta/VHS war and they don't care about quality in their DVD format. I think we all forget that this forum is populated by enthusiasts,not average consumers. The Laser disk was clearly superior to VHS or beta but was never a successful consumer format.

[piano632]

Other possible reasons might be that VHS tapes can hold 6 hours vs. 4.5 hours for Beta (never mind that 6-hour VHS looks like crap). Then there's the odd numbering system used for Beta tape lengths: How many min. is a L-500 or L-750 tape, I'm sure many asked. Despite all that, I wouldn't have traded a Beta for a VHS any day.

[hanugro]

It doesn't matter who wins the current DVD war,as neither format will ever be anything but minor niche formats. The average consumer didn't care about picture quality in the beta/VHS war and they don't care about quality in their DVD format. I think we all forget that this forum is populated by enthusiasts,not average consumers. The Laser disk was clearly superior to VHS or beta but was never a successful consumer format.

I don't quite agree. While it's true that watching standard DVD is enough for CRT-based 27-30" TV, it will be lacking picture quality in 40"+ LCD. With 40"+ LCD price falling down fast then within 2-3 years it will be common and demand for High Def media will follows.
Laser Disc never become successfull because it is big, heavy, bulky, and not easy to store/carry around. Also the fact that you have to stop/pause to play Side-A/Side-B (even on auto reverse players) does not feel quite right for home theater experience. But in Asia, LD was very2 popular before being stormed by VCD (despite low quality) and DVD.

[thecoalman]

There is one other factor in the porn debate, at the time besides mags there were no other outlets. With an iternet connection you can get all the free porn you want, even high quality stuff if you know where to look. :P I don't think it will be much of a factor if any in this format war.

You think IMAX porn would sell?

Bahahaha... IMAX porn, now that would be interesting....

[jman98]

Usually the softer the better.

I think the opposite is true if you're in the adult movie business.

You think IMAX porn would sell?

Um, did you maybe miss the joke here?

[Constant Gardener]

You think IMAX porn would sell?

Flesh Gordon for starters, then Attack of the Fifty Foot ...

[lordsmurf]

Why does this keep resurfacing?

Because there always has to be some revisionist ******* out there that wants to skew history and re-tell it. For example, pornography had nothing to do with why VHS won out over Betamax. I'd never even heard anything so absurd until a few years ago. As a person who is actually old enough to remember both formats, it came down to lack of available pre-printed movies, higher costs and shorter running time of blanks for earlier adopters.

I don't quite agree. While it's true that watching standard DVD is enough for CRT-based 27-30" TV, it will be lacking picture quality in 40"+ LCD. With 40"+ LCD price falling down fast then within 2-3 years it will be common and demand for High Def media will follows.

I won't bother mincing words: you're living in a video zealot's pipe dream fantasy world. LCD costs are still 5x-10x higher than tubes, and prices won't fall too much more for a while. DVD quality looks perfectly fine on 60" LCD screens, like it or lump it. You may botch your homemade videos or be unimpressed with homemade DVDs and older tape-based formats (a whole 'nother argument, as the "upgrade" to HD is anything but), but pressed DVDs are generally quite clean and look great on the super-duper resolution displays.

[TBoneit]

When Beta came out I wanted one despite the 1 hour time per tape. However not being able to afford it won.

Then VHS came out and had a two hour or 4 hour tape with a one even one day timer.... Wheee!

Back then I could have chosen Beta, VHS, V-Cord or the Quasar Great Time Machine(?) And earlier on I could rent a Reel to Reel VCR too.

Lucky me VHS which is what I bought won.

[oldandinthe way]

In my opinion Beta lost because it was a SONY product and Sony is a love or hate company.

Convinced their trinitron TV tube was the greatest on the earth and well worth a major price premium, they used exactly the same marketing techniques for Beta.

Well they got a share of the VCR market similar to their share of the TV market with this strategy, and lost the format war.

SONY couldn't and still can't market worth a damn.

[RLT69]

Seems that Sony did not endorse porn content on betamax. Also seems that Sony repeat it again with blue-ray.

Jesus H. Christ. Do people do any research anymore!

Sony stated they would not, "...mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers."

"The pornographers’ progress with HD may also be somewhat slowed by Sony, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray high-definition disc format. Sony said last week that, in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/business/media/22porn.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

Any other manufacturer can mass-produce Porn on blu-ray. Sony has stated that they won't. That does not prevent others from doing so.

Repeat after me, Sony DOES NOT equal blu-ray, blu-ray DOES NOT equal Sony!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association

There's an Association which backs blu-ray, Sony is but ONE company in that Association. Bottom line Sony does not control blu-ray. Can you people get that through your tiny little minds. This information has been out there too long for anyone to claim ignorance.

[oldandinthe way]

Blu-ray = SONY. As always these asssociations are dominated by one company, who has the largest vested interest in the success.

When failure is evident the other companies will peal away.

[powrwrap]

As to the reason VHS beat out Beta, there are snippets of truth in a lot of posts here. The reason VHS won out over Beta is that Sony declined to license out the patent they held on the tape transport mechanism. That caused JVC to come up with an inferior workaround method of drawing the tape across the read/write video heads. Yes, the picture was inferior but JVC licensed their patent out to just about anybody that wanted to make a VCR. If you wanted Beta you had to get a Sony (Sony eventually did a few private labels).

Once the hardware--VHS VCRs--began to get widespread distribution and at lower prices than Beta, the software (VHS prerecorded movies, yes, including porn) flooded into the market. I can remember the smaller Beta movie rental section at the video stores back in the early-mid 80's. Plus there were video stores everywhere renting VHS tapes. How many video stores can you remember that were converted gas stations?

It's a lot like MacIntosh vs. PC's. Apple has a technically superior product but is not licensing out their patents. PC's are everywhere and there is software up the wazoo.

BTW, my 22 year old Superbeta machine is still working....

[SingSing]

The morale of edTV link is put a complete movie or album on a tape/disc.

That's why VHS, CD, and DVD are the winners.
The losers are Beta, N.A., and SVCD.

[oldandinthe way]

It's a lot like MacIntosh vs. PC's. Apple has a technically superior product but is not licensing out their patents. PC's are everywhere and there is software up the wazoo.

Without reopening another of the impossible to resolve debates. Mac vs PC is more of a style vs technical merit debate.

The original Mac hardware was not technically superior to the PC. It was decidedly less hardware and greater reliance on software to reduce manufacturing cost.

The advantage the PC had in software availability was in part a result of numbers in the market that matters - corporate users, and the fact that Mac software had to be more intimately tied to the Mac "o/s". Changes in the Mac O/s required new releases of Mac applications because the applications were linked to the O/S. Some software developers felt the Mac O/S was not an O/S at all, but a subroutine library. Not that DOS was sophisticated.

Steve Jobs bag of tricks was evident then as now. Make a smaller screen than most users want so the resolution appeared greater than it was. Keep the architecture closed to maximize profits. Rely on standards like SCSI to avoid the risks of licensing fees, and reduce hardware talent required - even if product cost suffered.

The Mac adaptation of the Xerox Star user interface was not universally accepted, power users found it to be inefficient. The fact that all PCs now have a Star like interface is in part a reflection of the fact that hardware has advanced and applications software functionality has remained constant so there is plenty of power to mask the inefficiencies of the GUI. (I know audio and video aps were non-existant then but frankly they could be built without the existing Apple or Microsoft GUIs).

Independant of the merits of OS/X the fact remains that it came after the battle was resolved and it certainly alienated many Apple users who had to replace their hardware to upgrade their apps.

[powrwrap]

Steve Jobs bag of tricks was evident then as now. Make a smaller screen than most users want so the resolution appeared greater than it was. Keep the architecture closed to maximize profits. Rely on standards like SCSI to avoid the risks of licensing fees, and reduce hardware talent required - even if product cost suffered.

Superiority claims aside, this is the gist of my comparison of Beta/VHS to Mac/PC. Like Sony with Beta, Apple is keeping MacIntosh closed off to licensing out to other hardware developers, thus limiting its popularity. They want to control this market segment--and they are--at the cost of slower growth.

[MrSpeed]

Let me see if I can remember. I bought my first VCR around 1983. Beta machines were around but there were not as many titles to rent. BTW I have to admit it was cool to watch Marilyn Chambers at home

[ozymango]

As someone who still has both VHS and Beta VCRS (and a couple of U-Matic decks, just because I can't find anybody who wants 'em ), of course there are zillions of reasons why formats succeed or fail, some of them technological, some just plain weird, and all of this stuff is so easy in hindsight, ya know?

I'm guessing the "truth" about why VHS succeeded over Beta probably has smidgens of all of the arguments above, including the porn angle, no pun intended. My friend's parents used to run a video rental store, back when it cost them $150 for a tape that they'd rent to customers (and this was when a $150 was a lot of money!), and porn rentals made it possible for them to pay their bills. I'm not saying this therefore makes porn the leading source of VHS VCR sales but I wouldn't write it off to quickly, either.

And as everyone's mentioned, there's usually some particular feature that one medium offers over another (longer storage, better quality) that appeals to more people than others, so whoever figures out what that appealing thing is, that's who I'd bet on (for continued success). For the most part it really is as simple as VHS had longer tapes than Beta, to start, people wanted to play and record 2 hours, VHS had it, they got a foot in the door, and sometimes that's all it takes. If VHS was significantly inferior to Beta, Beta might have been able to catch up, but because for all intents and purposes the quality was the same, that was a big enough edge to build upon, for long-term VHS success.

My reasons for loving Beta was simple -- skip scan. With skip-scan, as you're fast-forwarding or rewinding a tape, you can press the rewind or ff button and you'll see a snip of the movie as you go, and it takes just a fraction of a second for the VCR to play that snip. Versus a VHS machine, which doesn't have u-loading (which U-Matics and almost every Beta deck has); with the first VHS decks, and still with most VHS decks, the VCR has to stop, load the tape, play the section, then unload the tape, resume transport, and this takes a few seconds. Granted, it's not hours or anything, but when you've got hundreds of tapes and hours of footage and you're trying to find a section of a show or movie, skip-scan is very nice. Especially in the day before linear time counters, hours/minutes/seconds.

BUT the "battle" between Blu-Ray and HD is much, much different -- back then, we were much more limited by the mechanics of technology, versus the politics of technology. It's just not possible to make a single VCR that can play both tape formats, due to the fact that every part o the transport (head angle, speed, tape travel) is/was different in VHS/Beta. Not so much in any of our newer optical disc technologies -- it's very possible to technologically create a machine that would play/record various formats, and the technological costs, in the long run, would be minor.

So what "edge" will one format have that makes it the dominant one? Or is this even a useful way to look at the two formats, as competitors?

Are CDs and DVDs competitors? Are hard drives and optical disks competitors? If it's just about putting movies out there for public viewing, the edge will go (I think) to whomever has more movies. Due to political pressure, Sony has that edge at the moment, and the difference between the VHS and Beta "wars" is that in this "battle," we have vastly greater resources in play, and at stake. In Sony's/Blu-Ray case, the medium is the movie, rightly or wrongly.

And the battle has just begun!

[edDV]

They can keep the movies, I want the data capacity.

[samijubal]

with the first VHS decks, and still with most VHS decks, the VCR has to stop, load the tape, play the section, then unload the tape, resume transport, and this takes a few seconds.

This isn't true of new VCRs. All VCRs from around 1990 to now leave the tape loaded around the drum on FF/REW. There were a few in the early days of real time counters that used an arm to pull the tape up to the audio/control head for the counter, but those arms cost more than just leaving the tape fully loaded, so they didn't last long.

[ozymango]

They can keep the movies, I want the data capacity.

And I want to be able to recover that data ten years from now!

[ozymango]

[
This isn't true of new VCRs. All VCRs from around 1990 to now leave the tape loaded around the drum on FF/REW.

Yeah, I know, but time is relative -- to you 1990 is a long time ago but I had my Sony SL-HF400 SuperBeta Hi-Fi deck back in the stone age, mid-80's; my comparable VHS deck at the time was a Fisher Hi-Fi (can't remember the model number) that was a great deck but took bloody forever to load and unload. For sheer elegance of use it's hard to beat a good Sony Beta deck.