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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?"
...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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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??