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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?"
This is one that is always quoted by marketing heads. Anybody have any good evidence to back this up? Why was beta better? What was the marketing campaign that won it for VHS?
I don't necessarily doubt this but I'd love to see the detail.
...is to kill the Supreme Court Betamax decision, now that they find that they'd rather have the ability of perfect control over media. Maybe they're hoping that by killing the technology the suit was over, the ruling will go away... :)
-Rob
I didn't even realize that it was still possible to get anything in a betamax format. Seriously, I'm not trying to troll, but when was the last time anyone even saw a betamax tape for sale?
Years ago (1991-1993) I was working for the Navy Broadcasting Service in Keflavik Iceland. Every week we would receive a shipment of three large containers. Each container was packed with video tapes containing content for us to play the following month on our base-wide television station. The tapes came in "SuperBeta" format from Sony. Basically, the tapes were some version of "BetaMax" but on tapes that were almost twice the width of the standard beta tape. Each tape could hold about 90 minutes of programming.
The format was great. It produced very nice resolution (which is needed for any kind of broadcasting, due to signal loss.) There are still television stations out there (particularly entertainment for military audiences) that still use the SuperBeta format. I'm wondering if Sony is going to force these stations to upgrade their facilities or if they will keep producing SuperBeta after the demise of Betamax.
Eventually the VHS people figured out how to do it, but for the first ten years or so you had to get out of fast forward mode in order to get a picture on the screen.
Our VHS circa 1982 lets you see the picture while you fast-forward. It also has a remote control with a cord on it, which is less than useful.
Still works, though mono audio forced it off the main TV long before DVD did the same for our newer VHS.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I've read several times now that because VHS tapes themselves were cheaper than Beta tapes, the suddenly-revitalized (due to VCRs in general) porn industry had a preference for publishing on VHS tapes. With more porn titles available on VHS, VHS quickly became the format of choice for home VCRs.
(Check out the book "Obscene Profits" by Frederick Lane.)
-Mark
I never owned a Betamax but was involved up close and personal with similar technology model: IBM's Microchannel (introduced mid 80s - same timeframe as Betamax). Superior technology or so they said. IBM sold the PS/2 line with no ISA slots - only MCA. Ethernet was expensive - token ring was cheap (an IBM technology)... once IBM 'had' you, you were at their mercy. Few 3rd party companies would pay the IBM licensing fees for MCA cards except for the server market. Non-IBM token ring cards were like hen's teeth (Madge was one) so moving away without rewring the network was a tough call. EISA and PCI finally put an end to all that nonsense. After that, I never again heard 'no one was ever fired for recommending IBM'.
After that, I rarely got into RWARs over a vendor's technology. I try to keep my loyalities to myself and my company
As for Sonys' Betamax, the consumer market is similar in some respects and the network can be an analogy to tapes: If you own 100 beatamax tapes, what are the implications of switching to VHS? VHS is substandard! (I'm thinking about the IBM rep saying ethernet is collision detect - collisions! oh my!)
I own quite a bit of Sony A/V equipment, including a tv, receiver/amp, minidisk, dvd, camcorder and even a DAT recorder (nice white elephant, that). I went that way because of their single remote technology and s-link. None are propietary formats (despite other posts here, sharp, jvc, kenwood and others manufacture MD). In retrospect, I would have probably been better off with a portable MP3 player.
Only question is why did they carry BetaMax for so many years? For those with a tape investment, I really think Sony did them a big favor. Not many companies will support their loyalists like that.
As long as some companies try to make everyone buy proprietary products, this will happen. VHS was not better than BetaMax. Sony simply did not want to share. Hence, VHS was more widely accepted because everyone could buy a VHS player, and not a very pricy BetaMax player. If you looked at minidisk 12 years ago, when CDs where starting to come out, they offered the same capacity, and so many more features. But in the End, it was cheaper for people to buy CDs, instead of buying proprietary expensive Sony only players and products. Same thing with sony memorystick. Make it an open source product, and just collect license fees, or what have you. Then everyone will use it if it is a good thing. I'm sure there are a lot more companies like this, but I just picked on Sony because it is their original product.
... So we had a V2000 system. Actually it was a Grundig machine. But anyway, V2000 was better than VHS/Betamax technically. It soon became pretty hard to find prerecorded tapes for it, though.
He says that geeks don't understand about the total package and that technical ability isn't the only thing. He's right in that is what geeks say. However, geeks do realize this, but they just don't know it.
From an example taken from The Other Site in the last day: programming languages. People will willingly use broken languages, not as superior, because they interface to more things, can be applied to more general purpose situations (even when they shouldn't be), or have bigger libraries. You only need to look to Perl and C.
Perl is an attrocious language judging on purely technical merits, however CPAN and all the sugar it has are what give people reason to use it. You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, "it does what I need good enough" or "I get work done in it." This is almost the same decision calculous that the author is expousing: people chose VHS because it did what they needed (recording a two hour movie unattended) and it did it well enough (they couldn't tell the difference in image quality).
Like, say, Lindows (tm)?
"fast follower" is a highly effective marketing strategy. In the context of the article, 'best' implies market acceptance, not quality.
RB
Technology Marketing is what happens when people turn their hard work over to people paid to manipulate others.
>>"... point of this article is if everyone buys it, then it must be better...
To the contrary, the point of the article is that technological quality is only one of the attributes that affect sales of a product. Price, convenience, ease of use, suitability for purpose are others. Technological advantages that can only be seen in a lab test, not subjectively by people using the product, don't carry much weight in the mass market.
doomed.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I don't know if anyone has come across the writer Bruno Latour but he argues convincingly that we need a more complex understanding of the way technology projects are started, run and completed in order to understand why certain technical decisions are made. Afterall there can be cost constraints, efficiency constraints, material constraints, management constraints, organisational constraints (ie we don't do it like that here) and so on and on.
The phrase heterogeneous engineering is a great term that refers to the way technical people have to engineer not just, say, the software, but also the managers, other people, organisational lethagy and so on just to get the thing out of the drawing room (let alone the door).
I remember working for a very prestigious and large media company who could not see the value of the Internet whatso ever. No matter how much I banged on about it. In the end I left as it was clear the managers and company were still living in the land of VAX/VMS... Shit they were *still* worrying about X25!
But it is interesting how we as engineers have to have the social skills as well as technical skills in order to move a project forward... and that can be much harder than the technical!
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
And Darwin's concept was done a great injustice by bandying about the phrase "survival of the fittest," when it should have been merely, "survival of the fit."
If you find a niche, it doesn't matter that there are successful predators out there that eat you, you merely must reproduce, faster than they can, and faster than they can eat.
In the case of the mac (which is what we're really talking about here, huh? VHS vs. Betamax! Pshaw! THoS EaR COdE WeRdZ!), Apple just has to watch Dell, HP, Compaq (oops!) et al figure out who's the Alpha Male of the dinosaur VARs, and let them gobble each other up. See http://www.mammals.org.
To a portion of the population--strongly represented here in Slashdot and probably among whom there's an elevated rate of Asperger's Syndrome--this must surely seem heretical.
I recall a time a few years ago when a fellow software "engineer" tried to express to me his irritation that multinational executives still flew around all over the world to have face-to-face meetings when teleconferencing VR rigs would be cheaper. I said, well, maybe it's the big, ugly, uncomfortable headgear that puts those executives off of such a cool technology. Among other things. "It just doesn't make sense", he replied.
No, I guess it doesn't make sense to people like that. Every time a clearly superior technology doesn't succeed in the market place, it must be the result of insidious forces acting in conspiracy to thwart the will of the smart and rational people. They say. "Linux is clearly the superior operating system. When will people wake up and realize that?" When, indeed? Maybe when it is?
or better yet: the absence of pr0n.
Popular mythology describes the failure of V2000 as a result of Philips prohibiting the release of porn tapes. In the eaarly days.
The failure of V2000 was a humbling experience for Philips. After that they never tried to impose their own standard on the mass consumer market.
Still, V2000 was (and is) vastly superiour to all the other systems. Double sided tapes (2x4 hrs), better picture quality, etcetera. Therefore more expensive. Which not a plus when you want to gain a foothold in a new mass market.
That's incorrect. Continuous loop tapes do not last longer, quite the opposite in fact! To get back into the loop, the tape has to fold, and that folding action causes oxide to flake off, causing the audio to degrade rapidly.
The reason why they use continuous loop carts in broadcasting is because they re-cue themselves automatically, and are ready for re-use right away. Forgetting to rewind a tape means dead air, which is a cardinal sin in broadcasting! Carts help prevent that.
And maybe this should be a warning to those companies that want to accommodate DRM into their products: you will marginalize your widget. I'm sure Jack Valenti preferred beta to VHS.
Jack Valenti hated them both. (cf: "Boston Strangler" comment.) If he had his way, the only place we could see movies now would be in the theaters, and it would be illegal to descrbe what we'd seen to other people. The only ones allowed to openly describe scenes from movies would be licenced reviewers (who paid an annual licencing fee, a fraction of which went to the MPAA becasue of the excessive use of their intellectual property).
The reason why VHS has won from BetaMAX was simply because of one thing: pr0n! The pr0n industry embraced the VHS technology because the tapes were fairly cheap. Because lots of pr0n was available on VHS, people bought a VHS recorder!
Simple network effects at play here: do NOT underestimate the power of pr0n, really!
-- JaWi
--------
To hell with Betamax and VHS. Philips V2000 format was better than the both of them. It had double sided tapes, supeior picture quality, embedded timecode and really long tapes. It was years ahead of both Betamax and VHS. I'm surprised the author of the article didn't llok in to V2000 as it was quite popular in Britain for a while, before losing the marketing battle.
As to the comparisons between VHS and Beta, I think the author makes a big blunder about VHS's success. I recall a TV interview with Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad which is a UK stack em high, sell em cheap electronics manufacturer. In the interview he said that his decision to make VHS machines in the early 80's was down to the fact that JVC offered him much more attractive licensing terms to use VHS as opposed to Sony who wanted twice as much for the Betamax system. Although market forces may have had an effect, surely VHS's success was more to do with the bigger profit margins it made for the manufacturers? Thus causing VHS to be promoted more at the expense of Betamax.
If Betamax was supposedly so bad, then why is the NFL currently standardizing on a derivative of the format? Betamax is alive and kicking and making a ton of money. It'd sure be nice if folks who write garbage like the article in The Guardian would at least try to research the info first.
for VHS and BetaMax technologies: data backups. I don't have links at hand, but is's similar to using a modem to pipe your backup onto tape. It's fairly easy for the electronically clueful to figure out; the main question is to get your analog output (from the modem) "into band" for the video inputs of the VCR (so you can use *all* of the helical-scanned tracks...) or else you lose a bunch of the formats' native capacity. On the basis of price alone, I imagine it's fairly competitive with CD-R and DVD.
C|N>K
Section 2.1 of Richard Gabriel's Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big is called "Worse is Better." Those with shorter attention spans may enjoy his later presentation Models of Software Acceptance: How Winners Win, which explicitly mentions VHS vs. Beta.
P.S. Beta was much better than VHS at keeping vertical lines straight, especially over multiple generations.
P0rn!
Sony was hesitant to license, or make available, the format to major porn makers. VHS was chosen. The main initial market for those $1500 players and $100 tapes was that normal horney people could finally see adult content in the privacy of their own home. Go check out some of those 1979-1980 Penthouse magazines on eBay and look in the back at the first tape advertisements. All VHS!
Those recording the history of the internet are hesitant to document the importance of adult content e.g. to developing secure credit card mechanisms. This was critical to the rise of the internet we know today.
If one is to learn from history, the history must be available in a complete form.
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.
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 hed.
I bet, without even reading the article, that the author overlooked the truth and these facts.
read and learn.
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 hed.
I bet, without even reading the article, that the author overlooked the truth and these facts.
read and learn.
The problem for Linux advocates (specifically, those people who for some reason or another are either trying to get other people to run Linux, or at least convince other people how clever they are for running Linux) is that they don't get what you said. When the choice comes between acknowledging and addressing the problems in user experience or calling the user a moron, too many soi-dissant advocates choose the latter.
There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.
Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.
For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.
Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.
Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video
Look at the GSM mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.
Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications .
DECT originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal . For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal
As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!
Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??