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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?"
I really thought Betamax was close to winning, too..
slashdot!=valid HTML
I stubbed my toe this morning, this will have an effect on a total of one more person than the end of sony betamax...
No more Betamax? I guess I'll need to buy a new doorstop then.
Phillips has decided to discontinue the 8-track tape.
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.
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?
Betamax and Betacam formats have little in common. They share the shape of the cassette, but tape are different. Recording speed and layout is different too. Whatever it is now, Beta is doing just fine in broadcast industry. The major types are:
Betacam (Obsolete)
Betacam SP (Probably the most popular analog pro video format)
Digital Betacam (Excellent quality, very slight compression)
Betacam SX (Compressed Digital, Cheaper than above)
All formats, except for the original Betacam support not only Betamax style cassette, but also a large one with 3x recording time.
Not a bad time to do it. DV has matured enough to absorb the impact. As a matter of fact, I bought a $500 video camera that uses Digital8 and am surprised at it's capabilities.
I have Premiere ($500ish), After Effects ($600ish), Photoshop ($600), and Lightwave ($1,600) as well. My $5,000 setup (my computer included) kicks the crap out of the TV studio I worked in a couple of years ago where one 3/4th Beta Deck cost around $20,000. The downside is that I don't quite get the color data that beta does. Can't say I miss it yet.
Price per performance has really changed in the last 5 years.
I wish I could record TV to MiniDV, though...
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.
I said it once, I'll say it again: BETAMAX != BETACAM. If you worked in video, you would know that. Max was a market failure, period. BetaCam is an industry standard. They have nothing to do with each other.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Obviously there aren't many videographers on /.
http://www.dvcentral.org/DV-Beta.html
Sony Corp.'s Betacam SP format is the standard of comparison of video tape recording formats. According to Sony Europe, more than 350,000 Betacam SP devices have been sold world-wide. The majority of broadcast electronic news gathering (ENG) operations currently use Betacam SP camcorders and VTRs. Virtually all broadcast stations require (or at least strongly prefer) Betacam SP source footage. Most clients of professional video production firms specify Betacam SP for industrial shoots and are likely to require videographers to use Sony or Ikegami camcorders. Although the M-II format from Panasonic Broadcast and Digital (formerly Television) Systems Company (PB&DSC) offers about the same performance as Betacam SP, Sony and Betacam SP are untouchable when it comes to brand recognition and status. As a result, all other video recording formats are ranked as "not up to Beta SP," "equal to Betacam SP," or "better than Beta SP." These comparisons, based on the beholders' perception of image quality, are reminiscent of the meaningless "broadcast quality" and "studio quality" bullet points on advertisements for consumer and low-end prosumer video gear.
The advent of the Digital Video (DV) format has ignited a controversy among current and prospective users of DV gear. Initially, arguments appeared regarding the "legality" of broadcasting NTSC DV's 480 instead of 483 active lines of video. Obviously, if broadcasting less than 483 active lines was illegal, all U.S. stations transmitting letterboxed movies would have by now lost their licenses. The subsequent controversy, DV's 4:1:1 vs. ITU-R BT.601-4 (formerly CCIR-601) 4:2:2 sampling, has generated thousands of messages in on-line forums, newsgroups, and listservers. This paper represents an attempt to dispel the rumor and innuendo surrounding the 4:1:1 versus 4:2:2 issue, especially as it relates to the "Is DV better (or worse) than Betacam SP?" controversy, and DV compression artifacts.
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
First off...BEFORE YOU POST EVERONE STOP AND READ THIS COMMENT!!!
From the Yahoo! article:
Sony said it would continue to offer repairs and manufacture tapes for the format, adding the move would not affect its Betacam products for the broadcasting industry.
GOT IT? Good. Don't post any more about how the broadcast industry is being hurt by this, or they're pulling the rug out from under them blah blah blah blah.
Now....on to the purpose of my post. We actually had a couple of Beta VCR's at my house for several years. My significant other enjoyed the format because...ready for this??....the tapes were smaller and took up less storage space (Groan..) But I liked the format because initially it did have better quality than VHS. And, with the evolution of the format, you could record nearly 2 hours of video on a tape, more than enough for a standard movie (Titanic fans, please don't flame me!!!)
On a little different note...Sony has a little present history doing this. Let me see by a show of hands (wait...no...that won't work)...uh...a show of posts, then, how many people own and operate a MiniDisk player on a regular basis? Anyone following the standards debate on Blu-ray?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Coca-Cola, Inc. announces it is discontinuing its "New Coke" line of products.
New Coke was renamed to "Coke II" in 1990. Apparently, Coca-Cola Co. still sells Coke II in some metropolitan areas.
--
ENJOY COCAINE!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is the format used for old school digital editing cuz it lets you timecode, and has decent quality. It will probably continue to be used for archiving and broadcast for some time to come.
Basically, these a days you transfer your source material onto beta, then into the editing station, then you edit, then you transfer onto another beta for distribution and delete the material from the editing station. You don't delete the edits so if you need to tweak it later you can get it back from the source material beta. In the olden days you'd to the edits on a low res-version on the computer, then use the edits to stream the right frames from the source beta to the final beta.
You can use DVC but it is significantly lower quality in my (limited) experience. DVD-R makes more sense for the final these days though. The disks are cheap and play in many more places. I saw a BBC pilot distributed that way a few weeks ago.
Actually, as others have posted, this turns out not to be the case.
Betacam is a broadcast format. Betamax (AKA "Beta") is a home format. They have little in common other than both being made by Sony.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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
The only people I know that love beta are a bunch of guys with classic p0rn that can't be replaced....
(don't ask)
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
I still use a Sony C20 Betamax which I bought brand new some, er, probably 18 years ago.
The picture quality is still embarrassingly better than our nearly new Panasonic VHS. ISTR that the Betamax has a technically superior tape path and is a sort of scaled down version of the U-Matic.
(The U-Matic was an industrial and ENG standard format some years ago and used 3/4" tape in a large cassette).
Why Iron was better than Bronze
Ever wonder what VHS stands for?
It stands for Vertical Helix Scan
now you know and knowing is half the battle...
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?
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.
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.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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??