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Sony Kills Betamax
Hiawatha writes "Years after losing its grip on the consumer VCR market, Sony has announced that it will discontinue the Betamax format. "With digital machines and other new recording formats taking hold in the market, demand has continued to decline and it has become difficult to secure parts," Sony said in a statement." Finally. Although this is the prototypical example of good technology outdone by better marketing, it's an example of a company being stupidly obstinate about wanting to own a system, and shooting themselves in the foot. Update: 08/27 17:52 GMT by H : Yes, they were successful in broadcast, and to some degree overseas - but the commercial success was still severely limited to, say, VHS.
BetaMax WAS and IS better, but when it was first introduced, the tapes only held ONE HOUR of video/audio.
This, obviously, sucks. And it meant that movies really couldn't be put onto Beta tapes without splitting them. VHS ruled the rental market because of this, and most people liked being able to record more hours of their own stuff, too.
So Beta wasn't perfect by any means. It wasn't mis-marketed, it just wasn't right for the market, period. In the beginning, anyway.
this is really bad news to the TV people, I think, for betamax is vastly superior in quality compared to VHS.
No it's not.
Even if you accepted the fact that Beta was superior to VHS, which many people would disagree with, you'd have a hard time finding even a rabid beta fan who claims it was VASTLY superior. I mean, VASTLY? Come on, that's ridiculous.
Beta lost because of technical inferiority; it just couldn't record enough for people's tastes, and the nebulous clearer image just didn't make up for that fact.
Beta was slightly better.
Yes, it ran the tape over the head at a higher speed (good for fidelity with magnetic tape), but was narrower than VHS (bad for fidelity with magnetic tape). By the time "Hi-Fi VHS" arrived in the late 80's, the gap in quality was pretty much already closed.
No matter which type of tape you used, you still had the problems of the incoming signal quality, and those were the days before component video and S-video were common, so you were mushing the video and audio signal into an RF converter to send a coaxial cable to your TV antenna input on channel 3 or 4.
You can talk all you like about how nice a fast-forward looked on Beta tape, but who gives a crap how good the commercials look as you zip over them? I remember when my family bought their first VCR. We went with VHS, not becuase of popularity (rentals wouldn't catch on for a couple years, so what the neighbors used was a non-factor), but because Beta cost more, both for players and for tapes, and the tapes had shorter running times. A few years later, a friend of mine bought a Harmon Kardon "HiFi VHS" machine that looked and sounded every bit as good as my other friend's Sony Beta machine. Even Sony finally gave in and started making VHS machines in the end... and they were (and still are) some of the best consumer VCR's on the market.
Now it looks like PVR's like TiVo, and HDTV's wider screen (which most DVD's support but VHS does not) are causing VHS to die out, but it will probably cling to life for another 15 years, just like Beta did, because obsolete != useless. If it still works, and you can't afford the shiny new stuff, you will probably still use it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.