Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
___
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.
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.
...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...
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.