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Why VHS Was Better
otis wildflower writes "An article in the UK's Guardian describes why, in the end, VHS is better than Betamax. While this may not be terribly useful knowledge on its own, the author then makes a pretty convincing case that viewing something's success or failure purely on technical merit is not an entirely accurate way of looking at things. For better or for worse, success of new products and technologies is determined by a broad range of factors that make up "the whole product", quality being only one, and possibly a minor one at that. Kind of explains what happened to the Atari Lynx and Jaguar, dunnit?"
Not the ol' Beta-superiority-undone-by-better-marketing myth.
Beta was superior in ONE WAY: it had slightly better quality. Yes, I said slightly.
VHS, on the other hand, had a LOT of advantages:
a) Longer recording length, which is what really killed Beta
b) Less expensive players
c) Less expensive media
d) Non-proprietary
Bottom line, VHS was far superior in the areas that mattered.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Sony did not shoot itself in the foot with Betamax. They've been selling VHS to one market and Betamax to another for years. That's called a win-win. Most consumers don't deal with Betamax these days, but it's been a mainstay of professional video production since its introduction. The only reason they're discontinuing it now is that digital video has just recently become good enough to replace it. Sony wisely decided to focus its efforts on beating competing DV equipment manufacturers, rather than invest in both technologies and have to compete with themselves, as well.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Beta is still used quite a bit in the commercial broadcast industry. Sony was making consumer products on the side, just cause there was still a nickel (truly a nickel) to be made. They aren't making enough nickels any more so the niche consumer product line has been discontinued. Beta is still alive and well in the broadcast industry, though.
The middle mind speaks!
here's a link that might help you. Essentially, Beta was first and had most of the innovations, but VHS won out overall. Betas quality was, as everyone will state, better but the record time and lack of pre-recorded media helped to kill it.
--trb
here's [urbanlegends.com] a link that might help you. Essentially, Beta was first and had most of the innovations, but VHS won out overall. Betas quality was, as everyone will state, better but the record time and lack of pre-recorded media helped to kill it.
... the big rage was the ability to record your own movies and material, directly off the television transmission.
Pre-recorded media wasn't a factor until long after the VHS-Beta battle was over. Almost no one was buying movies back then
The urbanlegends link portrays one perspective (and is quoted as an authority, although in truth it is no more authoritative than any other perspective), however, other early players in the consumer video market have argued a much different perspective.
At any given point in time, Beta was noticably better than VHS in features/quality (recording length excepted, although almost no one uses the 8 hour super-slow really-crappy record mode that I know), so saying "VHS caught up" really sidesteps the entire question of why VHS won, given that at any point in the battle VHS was on the losing side of the "technically better" argument.
What really killed Beta, according to some players at the time, was Sony's asinine licensing, or rather, the lack thereof, in direct contrast to JVC's willingness to license VHS to pretty much anyone willing to write a check. The entire event is very analogous to Apple undercutting other power-pc manufacturers, or Sun undercutting other sparc manufacturers, Sony was very stringent in who they would license Beta to.
The result was that there were four or five competing VHS brands, against Sony's Beta. Consumers correctly perceived a competitive market on the one hand, and a Sony proprietary market on the other, and as they did with Intel vs. Everyone else (remember, Intel allowed for competing motherboard and computer manufacturers, IBM notwithstanding), consumers went for the format that had clear competition.
The other factor of having multiple VHS manufacturers is the perception that VHS was already a standard catching on, while Sony was the sole promoter of Beta. Whether consumers chose VHS because they saw competition, or because they perceived it as having caught on (since there was competition), or simply because of price, the fact remains that the deciding factor was licensing and the presence of multiple vendors, not the quality of the underlying format.
In a sense that could be called 'marketing', but more correctly VHS's success is attributable to its 'licensing.'
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I had always understood that part of the reason Sony lost the "format wars" was due to their fumbling introduction of two-hour Betamax machines. Supposedly, these machines would not play tapes recorded by the previous generation Betamax machines. I seem to remember that Sony got all huffy about complaints, which drove annoyed consumers looking for longer-recording times to buy VHS purely out of spite.
On another note - Does anyone remember the tape-stackers that you could buy for Betamax? They would allow you to stack four or so tapes into a cartridge that hung on the outside of the machine and then somehow rotate themselves in and out of the recorder! Can anyone say "Rube Goldberg"?
MjM
I only mod up...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
This guy basically takes way too long to explain that BetaMax had was by far the better product, but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
And he minimizes the difference in image quality between the two formats, wihch is a mistake. BetaMax's image quality was, and is, much better, both initially and especially after multiple passes.
To quote a fellow Farker on this guy: I think I'll go out and purchase a cheap but popular car.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
a lot of people are confused about this phrase, thinking of 'fit' as being technical superior.
in fact the term fit does have nothing to do with that, but should be interpreted as 'fitted for a certain purpose'
for example one of the reasons that windows version whatever is so popular with computer iliterate persons is that it takes you by the hand to do a lot of things, which can be a pain for power users, but not for newbies. in that sense windows is most 'fitted' for that situation, just as linux is for power users, server systems, or as BSD on powerful stable systems with 1000's of connections at a time.
other examples are software programming where C++ can be the best solution for developing algorithms, and VB for simple DB connected user interfaces.
the 'fittest' solution survives in the place where it is used at its best. C is not 'better' than VB. it is fit for other purposes than VB.
you can only talk about 'better' when two things are designed for the exact same purpose.
Interfacer.
He argues that Betamax was actually more popular when it began, and they had a "defacto monopoly from tape incompatabilities." The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced (and was cheaper, but only after losing market too much market share to matter).
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
When they were released, betamax had only 1 hour tapes.. VHS had two hour tapes...
You could record a film onto VHS... which you couldn't do with beta unless you were sitting in front of it to change the tapes halfway through.
if i remember correctly, greedy sony refused to license the technology to anyone else, wanting all the profit for themselves. instead they got nothing.
also didnt know beta could not record a whole movie (never owned 8 trach either). what were they thinking? they must have known tv shows were 1/2 and 1 hours long, and that movies were longer. im sure they were not afraid of copyright violations, as they took the movie industry to court for 'consumer' rights an won. dont think they are so generous now that they own a record label.
these days sony is a grimy, sleazy company with very little to offer besides hype. i cant think of one product they have that someone else doesnt make better.
A name you can trust.
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
VHS was better because it became more popular.
Next week we will be arguing that the best music ever composed is that which has sold the most, and that the best movie is the one which has been the highest grossing.
In summary, the best approach to creating the best new and exciting products is to recycle old ones in new packaging and market the hell out of them.
A great deal of this article spends its time talking about the "whole product" and applying it to everything from software to cars.
He says when consumers buy a technologically inferior product, they are really buying the ability to chooseand buying product support/longevity
Really? I thought the success of competing standards has always been based on two things: clout and marketing, not technical specifications. Your average consumer will choose brand X not because they've carefully weighed the benefits of it over brand Y but because they saw a really funny ad on superbowl sunday about it. Don't overestimate the average joe since what he will always buy into, is the hype.
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ATS11=0 the secret to beating everyone else to a 1 line board.
Off-topic I know but I need to get this off my chest. I'd love to get some of the Sony Digital stuff but I dislike memory stick. 128M is just not enough capacity and Sony is not keeping up with its competitors. Also, it's more expensive for the same capacity and not many people make it. My guess is that it probably isn't tops either in the write speed area. After Beta, Sony should learn how to recognise a loser technology earlier and dump it. Am I the only one bypassing Sony equipment because Memory Stick?
The Betamax vs. VHS myth has been a favorite straw man argument of Mac-heads for a long time. It's nice to see that someone with a column has exposed this myth.
The "killer app" for the VCR was the movie, and Betamax was unable to run it. Betamax was a closed, proprietary platform that lost out to superior open standards. Beta's only claim to superiority was a couple more lines of horizontal resolution. But it wasn't a difference that you could actually perceive, like the difference between a 2.2GHz machine and a 2.4GHz one. And by 1985, that lead was gone.
For better or for worse, success of new products and technologies is determined by a broad range of factors that make up "the whole product", quality being only one, and possibly a minor one at that.
A very important point is that "quality" of a product is not defined by the producer but by the consommator.
This also means that what one consumer is ready to pay 100 euros for, another won't buy it for more than 80, and others not at all (latest edition of Italian-Spanish dictionary f.ex.)
What happened with Beta/VHS was that the VHS specs were made available to various constructors who competed between themselves to produce cheaper units.
Cheaper price was simply "higher quality" factor to consumers that beeing able to record on both sides of the casette. (and other features).
It is therefore just silly to say that "Quality" is a minor factor in a product's success. (Unless some monopoly company had f.ex. made deals to pre-install a VHS unit in all televisions manufactured)
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Let's take a simple example: digital audio tape (Dat). Get someone to compare Dat with a humble C90 compact cassette and they will find Dat to be technologically superior, especially for recording music. However, if you consider "the whole product", Dat is vastly inferior for most people most of the time. This is why people still buy millions of cassettes, while Dat has virtually disappeared from consumer use.
Er...I thought the RIAA effectively taxed DAT out of the reach of consumers? Dat is only inferior because it's so damn expensive.
VHS tapes don't get scratched and skip like DVD's. You can fast forward through copyright notices at will.
Too many technically superior standards aren't popular. Ogg Vs Mp3, Jabber Vs MSN/AIM. Not nearly enough people use IRC. Anyone care to list more?...
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
Indeed, the main thing that didn't fit was the idea was that Betamax was "technically superior". Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that VHS's quality was superior.
This is simply not correct. At work, we have several VCRs for professional use, and the Betacam SP rox in picture quality, sound quality and durability in comparison with SVHS. There is a VERY good reason for the Betas use in professional enviroments since long ago, and the superiority in all-over quality is one of them. If you can't see any difference in picture, you're either colour blind for severely seeing impaired. Or maybe two and a half glances at the screen in a videostore 15 years ago isn't enough.
As for the one hour tapes, this is flat out wrong. Sony did introduce longer running tapes, when the tape technology got better. But in contrary to its competitor, the tapes maintained the Beta quality and seldom broke down as the VHS E120+ tapes have a tendency to do. Especially the E240, don't store any valuable memories on them!
Popular has never meant better - not if you are talking about true quality.
This is absolutely true from a geek/technical perspective, but from a busniess model perspective, it IS superior, ultimately, VHS was the product the consumer decided offered the most value for the money. This is absolutely the case with Wintel PCs today. Most people here on Slashdot would never want Wintel PC, sure, they'll have a "Lintel" (Linux/Intel) or a "LAMD" (Linux/AMD), or perhaps even Mac OS X like myself, and that's because we know that a bug-ridden security-flawed Borg mother ship-contacting OS is coupled with the cheapest metric assload of hi-tech chinese commodity PC parts inside. The consumer doesn't know or care about true technical details, the only process affecting the purchase is that the product has ALL these features, functions, and holy Batman, look at that low LOW price. What a bargain! I get an HP Pavilian with a built-in graphics card, built-in sound card, M$ Windows XP Home Edition, a free printer and monitor for $649 after rebates. The wife and kids will love me, and besides, PC programs are everywhere, on every street corner. You see? Cheap Wintel PCs are not technically superior to Linux PCs or Macs, but from the busniess model perspective, the consumer saw the most value in the Wintel PC, even if it does crash twice a day, that's what everyone is used to experiencing. The consumer, from his or her perspective, isn't missing a thing, and more importantly, it's become part of their way of life, they just press control-alt-delete when the need to, it's what they're used to doing.
...the marketplace should never be open to formats which are almost direct replacements for previous formats.
...and the BBS versus MiniTEL.
In 1973, when the Compact Disc was introduced, the "infrastructure of capabilities, services, and support" for analog audio cassettes - prerecorded and otherwise - was vastly superior to that of the audio cassette. The CD prevailed despite the fact that there was no ability to record - analog cassette recorders are now most often encountered as unused legacy devices on multi-function audio hardware.
This "whole product" theory is an unenlightening justification for the emerging popularity of specific standards - it's the best product because it's the one most people buy? While there's truth to this, this fact is often less interesting than examining WHY this is the case.
If the technical standards of Betamax were superior to VHS - and they were - it's more useful to examine why these did not produce the dominant product than it is just to hand-wave the issue by saying that the best product is that which everyone else ended up buying. Any discussion of VHS versus BetaMax that doesn't discuss the fact that Sony wouldn't license its format to adult video studios misses another important aspect of why formats emerge and gain dominance over existing formats - the 'killer ap'.
The fact that he dismisses DAT audio with his "whole product" argument does not strengthen it in the least. The DAT cassette was a product the market was eager and ready for, and the more passive segment of the consumer base would have eventually caught up with the geeks, audiophiles, and techs. The RIAA crippled the format before it reached the consumer by disabling digital-to-digital copying, which given the dominance of the audio cassette DESPITE noted technical deficiencies (fragility, sound quality on normal-bias cassettes, less convenience for liner notes than vinyl), would have been an easy sell to a consumer base used to direct copying. Score one for the RIAA.
Enter MP3s. I've argued that the MP3 format is the just revenge of the marketplace against the deliberate crippling of DAT audio by the RIAA. The MP3 format became popular for technical reasons and became ubiquitous because the "whole product" was exactly what the marketplace had wanted and needed ever since the pre-recorded music industry moved to a read-only CD format - a high fidelity means of audio dubbing free from the limitations and physical fragility of analog cassettes. Had the RIAA had computer audio formats on its radar before it became a consumer reality, have no doubt that it, too, would have been a great idea that never made it to the broader marketplace.
The argument isn't, and never has been that BetaMax was the "better" format or that it was more suitable for the marketplace - the argument is that, based on wholly technical anaysis, it delivered a better performance than VHS. The VHS standard won out because RCA didn't keep their product a proprietary standard subject to its licensing regieme, because of porn as the 'killer ap' among early VHS adopters, because it was a cheaper product to adopt for end-users as well as studios (related to the license issue), and because as more manufacturers developed for what was effectively an open standard, they developed features to get their products noticed which in many cases became standards - multiple recording speeds, for instance. There's no reason why, if the BetaMax standard were open, a savvy competetor in the market could have developed multiple recording speeds. Sony felt it had a say in this matter, RCA didn't.
While the "whole product" isn't a completely invalid method of analyzing competing formats, it is as narrow a look at a larger issue as solely focusing on the technical specs, and is particularly poorly-suited toward determining why a particular format bucks the trend of the status quo and gains market dominance.
If "whole product" were the whole story, we'd probably have never gotten to VHS or BetaMax, and Laser Disc and DVD would have been relegated to a curious historical diversion like the Ford Edsel, 3D cinema, or - more to the point - the DIVX DVD format...
The JWZ piece was on target, and the reaction here predictable.
A pair of insupportable assertions runs through many posts attacking anyone who suggests that the reason for Linux's limited popular success rests with Linux, not with people who don't use it.
The first assertion: I figured out how to use this thing the hard way, so everyone else should as well.
The second assertion: People don't use Linux because they're either too lazy to figure it out or too stupid. Either way, I'm better than they are because I use Linux.
In truth, there's much about Linux that's a waste of time: multiple installation routines; conflicting packaging "standards"; hazardous library seas; etc. Even for professionals, learning about these things is just annoying. Someone with a commitment to the open source philosophy behind Linux may be accept these annoyances. The rest of the world will just avoid Linux.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Try the following. Grab a computer and install a version of RedHat linux from 1999. Now install the latest version. You'll notice a phenomenal difference between the two products.
The more recent version will have a simple, pretty graphical installer that recognizes just about any hardware and self-configures. It'll have a nice desktop interface that's clearly modeled after Windows/Macintosh. It'll have an office suite designed to be comfortable for someone who's used to MS Office. Almost all of the day-to-day configuration issues (think editing text files) from the 1999 version will have been moved into simple-to-use control panels accessable from the desktop.
Sure, the current version isn't perfect, and it may not be enough to convince most users to switch. But to claim that Linux "expects the customer to change rather than the product" is to set up a strawman that has little to do with reality.
While his considerations might be partially true, in fact Betamax is a good example for a wrong patent strategy. Sony tried to establish a monopoly by not licensing the patents to competitors.
As a result, the competitors successfully "invented around" and produced VHS. The VHS-patents were licensed at reasonable rates, and so a lot of companies entered the market with own VCRs, tapes and "infrastructure". Their competition made prices lower, and their combined salesforce did the rest to kick Sony out of the market.
Years later, when Sony's researchers invented the compact disks (for the younger readers: devices used to store music before MP3 was invented), Sony and Philips decided to license the technology to everyone at reasonable prices - and the few cents per disks later added up to billions of dollars.
In fact, "Apple and IBM" was the same story - Apple tried to dominate the world with a proprietary system and failed, while IBM "only" took a few dollars for every PC build...
REWIND and FAST FORWARD were practically impossibly lagging tasks and that is why betamax died.
Ask experts : Betamax audio head was TOO FAR APART from video head for efficient tape path!
It was a mini form of UMAT 3/4 inch crap and unsuited for VIDEO CAMERAS and unsuited for user wanting to hit REWIND + STOP + PLAY + FAST FORWARD + STOP +PLAY.
Why? Because the excessive disatnce between the linear audio head (used in prerecorded movies and part of standard) and the distance from the helical scanning head was WAY too far apart comapared to logical and efficient and non-retarded VHS. (Each ff or RW required tape path to be placed back into cassette for high speed motion, and threading took AGES in betamax crap).
Nobody seems to remember this or know this.
I and maybe a handful of other engineers seem to remember how painful it was to fast forward and rewind on ANY betamax deck.
They all sucked.
Them VHS got an exotic M-Format ultra hirez by running tape at 4x speed for pro highend cameras and then the betamax tape had no advantage. VHS at quad speed was unbeatable even if it only held 30 minutes.
Eventually S-VHS came out, allowing 120 minutes at qualities exceeding betamax.
But nobody remembers that Betamax sucked for fast forward and rewind and was unsuited for good hand held cameras all because of its asinine huge distance between audio head and helical head.
I bet, without even reading the article, that the author overlooked the truth and these facts.
read and learn.
This guy is not qualified to do technical coverage. Actually, he's pretty much a failure as a journalist.
You need to do actual research to write an article sometimes.
Yes, his talk of compatibility makes the whole argument circular, true. But that is the core assertion of this article, so I won't touch it.
The 1 hour limitation was a serious problem. But the real problem with Beta was that Sony wanted higher licensing fees for companies to produce players than JVC did. As a VCR maker, that was pretty simple math to do.
Then he goes on to show how Beta wasn't "technically superior" either, since VHS has the chance to upgrade to the compatible Super-VHS format.
Well, that's true. Except Super-VHS isn't compatible. It's partly compatible. Also, Beta had its own Super- variant. It was called ED Beta and was the highest quality analog consumer video tape format ever. VHS was lucky to get about 225 lines of resolution. S-VHS was a lot better with 350 lines of resolution. However, ED Beta whomped them all with 500 lines of resolution. It generally had better quality than any source available at the time, including LaserDisc which had about 400-450 lines of resolution.
Finally, what about VHS HQ? VHS HQ was a more significant development than S-VHS. I owned an S-VHS deck (pre HQ) and VHS HQ produced almost as large a picture improvement as S-VHS and unlike S-VHS it truly was fully compatible. How successful was VHS HQ? Well, eventually it took over the whole market. All VHS decks have been HQ for over 5 years, they just dropped the name since every one had it anyway.
This is a columnist I'll never have to read again. He's full of himself and full of shit.
I have a large library of movies recorded onto Beta tapes. Entire movies. The idea that people bought VHS because they could record movies on them is patently ridiculous. He, himself notes that movies were first released on Beta - the format he then claims is too small to hold a movie.
Everyone I knew who bought a VHS rather than a Beta machine, back when VHS was winning the marketing war, did so because you could program the VHS machine to record all your favorite programs for a week or two. At least, someone could, presumably. None of the folks I knew who chose VHS for that feature ever, ever used it. Most could never even figure out how to set the clock.
VHS won that war because of better marketing. They came up with a feature with marginal utility (longer tape length) and convinced a whole lot of people that it was essential.
Information is not Knowledge
The TV station I work for used to shoot on Beta, and still uses a Betacart playback system for commercials. Sony was very smart to adapt it to a market that would benefit from its picture quality.
Plus, the tape size made it perfect for shooting out in the field - much easier than carting around a camera plus a seperate recording deck.
So, Sony may have failed in the consumer market, but more than made up for it in the professional market.
What really killed Beta was price. The cheapest machines available were always VHS. Sony knew that they had a superior product--they were consistently 6 months ahead of VHS is technical innovation--and they figured they could charge a bit more for their video recorders (and for third party licenses). After all, it was a pricing model that worked just fine for all of Sony's other products. And it made sense if you thought of the primary uses of a VCR as being time-shifting of TV and occasionally playing a purchased tape. What Sony didn't anticipate was that the major use of the VCR would turn out to be playing video rentals.
Carrying two formats was expensive for video stores. And since the cheap VHS players were more popular, they stocked VHS tapes more heavily. Which was another reason, in addition to price, for consumers to buy VHS. Which encouraged rental shops to cut back still further on beta. By the time Sony got wise and cut prices drastically on their low end betas, it was too late for beta to recover.