Videotape format war

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A Betamax cassette (top) and a VHS cassette (bottom).

The video tape format war was a period of an intense format war of rival incompatible models of video cassette recorders in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has gone down in marketing history as the classic example of this kind of market competition.

Home video cassette recorders became available in the early 1970s like the VCR system from Philips in 1972, however the first system to be successful was Sony's Betamax. This was quickly followed by VHS (Vertical Helical Scan) from JVC, and later by Video 2000 from Philips.

Sony had demonstrated a prototype system to the other electronics manufacturers in 1974, and expected that they would back a single format for the good of all. But JVC in particular decided to go with its own format (despite Sony's appeal to the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry) and the classic format war began.

1 Competing technologies
2 Market share
3 End of Betamax
4 References
5 See also
6 External link

[edit] Competing technologies

The first battleground was recording time. The original Betamax systems of the NTSC television system could record for a maximum of one hour, which was not enough for a whole feature film. VHS could manage two hours, due to larger cassettes and slower tape speed; Sony responded with the "BII" tape speed which allowed for longer recording time at the expense of recording quality, quickly replacing "BI" as the default tape speed. Thinner tape allowed both formats to increase still further. For PAL versions, Beta could record for 3 hours and 15 minutes, compared to 3 hours for VHS, and both running times were extended with thinner tapes. With Long Play (LP) technology available by the mid-80s, a PAL VHS cassette could run for up to 8 or even 10 hours, at the expense of picture quality and inter-machine compatibility. The longest Betamax tape marketed is the L-830 which runs for 3 hours and 35 minutes on the PAL system.

Betamax offered a slightly higher horizontal resolution (250 vs 240 lines for PAL), lower video noise, and less luma-chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was marketed as providing superior pictures to VHS. In practice, however, VHS picture quality was very similar to that from Beta, as the actual picture performance depended on other factors including the condition or quality of the tape, and individual video recorder models.

[edit] Market share

When home VCRs started to become popular in the UK, the main issue was one of availability and price. VHS machines were available through the high street rental chains such as Radio Rentals and DER, while Beta was seen as the more upmarket choice for people who wanted quality and were prepared to pay for it. By 1980, out of an estimated 100,000 homes with VCRs, 70% were rented, and the presence of two competing formats meant that renting was an even more attractive choice, since a small fortune (about £2000 or $2600 in today's prices) could be spent on a system which may become obsolete. By the time Betamax machines became easier to rent, VHS had already claimed 70% of the market.

Within continental Europe there were three choices by 1980, with the arrival of the Video 2000 format from Philips and Grundig, which replaced Phillips' outdated "VCR" format. Although featuring capabilities that were ahead of their time, V2000 had a long development cycle and arrived late to the market. Players were found to be less reliable than their VHS and Beta counterparts, and the format never gained substantial market share. V2000 was cancelled in 1985, the first casualty of the format war.

Sony suffered by their reluctance to sign licensing agreements with studios to have films made available in Betamax. Sony also refused to allow pornographic material to be released for their system. Betamax's combination of lower market share and a lack of available titles strengthened VHS's hand, and gradually the public turned away from Beta. In 1983 the top selling video recorder in the UK was the Sanyo Beta VTC5000. 1984 was Beta's best year with a 25% market share, but by 1986 it was down to 7.5% and continued to decline further.

[edit] End of Betamax

Betamax sales dwindled away and VHS emerged as the winner of the format war - despite being the least sophisticated of the three main rivals. VHS benefited from continuous development from multiple manufacturers (including Sony) over the years, and innovations such as high speed picture search, Hi-Fi stereo sound and fast-load tape mechanisms saw it keep pace with and eventually surpass Betamax.

In 1988 Sony began to market their own VHS machines, and despite claims that they were still backing Beta, it was clear that the format was dead -- at least in Europe and the U.S.. In parts of South America Beta continued to be popular, and in Japan the format was developed into ED-Beta and SuperBeta, and was still produced up to the end of 2002. The rise of DVD finally took away the niche market that Betamax had survived in during the 90s, giving the home format a total lifespan of 27 years.

Today, the only remaining aspect of the Betamax system is the slang term 'Betamaxed', used to describe something that had a brief shelf life and was quickly replaced by the competition.

Despite the failure of Betamax, its technological successor, the Betacam tape, would become an industry standard for video recording, production and presentation, and continues to be used to this day, only now beginning to be supplanted by direct hard drive storage of video.

After the videotape format war the major electronics corporations agreed on a single standard for DVD in December 1995, but a format war resulted from a failure to agree on a single standard for DVD's high-definition successor in May 2005 [1].