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The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a war erupted in the world of video technology. Two competing videotape formats fought to gain supremacy in the market. In the end, one format crushed the other and was left as the victor. However, legend holds that the inferior format was actually the victorious one. Learn more about the Betamax vs VHS videotape wars, and if the worst technology actually won, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash EED. That's mintmobile.com slash EED. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. There are some of you listening to this who will remember the videotape wars quite well. Or if you don't remember the format war, then at least you remember videotapes.
For those of you too young to remember videotape, back in the days before Netflix and the internet, you could store video in an analog format on magnetic tape. The tapes were extremely popular and most households in developed countries had them. You could buy or rent movies on tape, record directly from television, or record your own videos on tape. Before I get into the Betamax vs VHS formats, I want to give a brief history of videotapes because, quite frankly, this seems like an entire appropriate place to do so.
If you remember back to my episode on the history of audio recordings, during the Second World War, American radio engineers noticed something odd about German radio broadcasts. The quality of their repeated episodes was just as good as the quality of their live episodes. This was not the case in allied countries where recordings had to be made on a wax disc. After the war, it was discovered that the Germans had developed magnetic tape that could record audio at very high levels of quality.
The technology spread rapidly after the war and began being used for audio recordings in the early 1950s. This is why there was such a great leap in audio quality in the recordings from this era. The same magnetic tape, it was realized, could be used to record signals from the new medium of television. While a video signal was more complex, it could be saved using a wider tape in addition to recording the audio as well.
The world's first videotape demonstration was given on November 11, 1951 by Bing Crosby Enterprises, the company owned by the singer Bing Crosby. Other companies, including the BBC and RCA, began experimenting with videotape in the early 50s as well. In the early days of television, recordings of broadcasts were made on a device known as a kinescope, which was literally a film camera pointed at a video screen.
The first commercial videotape recorder that was good enough to replace a kinescope was sold by the Ampex Corporation out of Chicago in April of 1956. By November of that year, CBS was using videotape to broadcast programs that had been recorded earlier. Known as VTR for videotape recording, the technology became widespread within television networks because tapes could be reused and they cost a lot less money than using a kinescope.
It didn't take long for people to begin imagining videotapes for home use. Reel-to-reel audio machines had developed a niche with high-end audio consumers. Certainly, there must be a niche for video as well. The first home VTR system was called Telcan, which was short for television in a can. It was released in 1963 by the Nottingham Electric Valve Company in the UK. The device was incredibly expensive, costing over 30,000 inflation-adjusted pounds.
It was an open reel system that could only record 20 minutes of video, and only in black and white, which was the only type of television available in the UK at the time. Needless to say, the system was not a hit. In 1965, Sony released the CV-2000, which was their first consumer videotape system. It was much cheaper than the Telcan system, but it had the same limitations. The 1960s saw the release of new magnetic tape formats for audio, which were easier to play.
The tape was encased in a cassette, which meant that you didn't have to handle the raw tape. The cassette concept was adapted to videotape, and several videocassette formats were introduced. Sony released their U-matic format in 1971, and Philips released their VCR format in 1972. These were marketed primarily to professional video producers. The first home videocassette system was from neither company. It was called CartraVision.
Cartrovision devices were entire televisions with tape players built into the TV. You could purchase blank tapes to record programs, but you could also rent pre-recorded movies, which was an industry first. The pre-recorded cassettes were designed such that they could not be rewound inside a standard Cartrovision player. The Cartrovision players were very expensive, selling for $1,350 or about 9,000 inflation-adjusted U.S. dollars.
The tapes, it turns out, were highly sensitive to humidity and the vast majority of them were destroyed sitting in warehouses. Cartrovision sales were flat and the company went out of business within a year. Today, Cartrovision televisions are extremely rare and are worth a lot of money to collectors. The idea behind Cartrovision wasn't a bad one. Major electronic manufacturers could see the benefit of consumer video cassette players. Which finally brings me to the subject of this episode.
In 1974, Sony began work on a consumer video cassette system, and in 1975 they released their system, which they called Betamax. The selection of the name had two meanings. The first was because it was a Japanese word which described how video signals were recorded to the tape, and the second meaning was from the Greek letter beta, the shape of which looked like how the tape physically moved in the machine.
The first Betamax cassettes which were released were 156mm or 6.1 inches long and could hold an hour of recorded video. Around the same time that Sony was working on the Betamax system, the JVC Corporation in Japan was working on their own format, which they called VHS for Video Home System. JVC released its system to the public in 1976. VHS tapes were larger than Betamax tapes, but they could record two hours of video as opposed to Betamax's one.
In a world with two or more competing technical formats, usually only one of them will survive. It's a lot easier for everyone to just agree on some sort of standard that everyone can use, rather than having incompatible formats floating around that cause confusion. Here I should address the legend which has surrounded the Betamax vs VHS debate for decades. The legend says that Betamax was a superior product and technically better than VHS, but it lost out in the market anyhow.
It, along with the QWERTY keyboards, are used as examples to prove how the best product doesn't necessarily win. I've addressed the QWERTY keyboard issue in a previous episode, and the short version of it is that QWERTY keyboards weren't actually worse than alternative keyboard layouts. So was Betamax really better than VHS? There were some very technical arguments to be made for Betamax. For starters, the video resolution of Betamax was 233 horizontal lines. VHS only had 220 lines.
Technically, Betamax did allow for higher resolution video. However, the difference between 233 and 220 was so small that most people couldn't tell the difference if they saw both systems running side by side. Betamax also offered something called Betascan, which allowed for high-speed image search forwards and backwards. Furthermore, Betamax tapes were also smaller and more compact.
So, there is an argument to be made that Betamax was in some technical way superior. But the technical advantages of Betamax were seen to be small or inconsequential. Considering that Betamax had a full one-year head start and they had some technical advantages over VHS, why was it that VHS won out in the end? The biggest thing was that the first generation of Betamax tapes could only record an hour's worth of video.
If you wanted to record a sporting event on television, you couldn't do it with a single Betamax tape. You couldn't watch an entire movie on a single Betamax tape either. When VHS tapes were released, they could record two hours of video, which was enough for a full movie and enough to record most of a game. When it came to what people actually wanted to do with a home video player, VHS met their needs better.
Moreover, the quality of VHS was pretty much the same as broadcast television, so a few more lines of horizontal resolution didn't really matter. While the amount of video that could be put on a tape was probably the biggest reason why VHS won in the end, it wasn't the only reason. Sony viewed their system as a proprietary format. They tried to get the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry to adopt Betamax as the standard for the entire industry.
and Sony would retain ownership and control the standard and would then license out the technology to other companies. JVC felt that an open standard would be better, a standard that everyone could use without having to pay a licensing fee. Soon after the formats hit the market, changes were made to adapt to market conditions. Sony eventually released a version of Betamax which ran the tape slower to hold two hours of video. However, companies began releasing VHS players which could record four and eventually six hours of video on a single tape.
There was much more consumer demand for storing more video on a tape than there was for higher quality video. Four hours allowed for an entire football game to be recorded, which was something Betamax couldn't do. Because VHS machines were created by a multitude of companies, there was also more competition. Betamax machines were only built by Sony and a few small other manufacturers that licensed the technology.
By 1980, VHS had 60% of the market in the United States. By 1981, VHS had 75% of the market, and by 1984, they held a 92.5% market share. Because VHS was a more open format that didn't require licensing, it had more support from movie studios. More movies were released in VHS, and some movies simply couldn't be released in Betamax because they were too long.
When video rental stores began to proliferate, they gravitated towards the format that more people had and that more movies were available for. Eventually, new and improved versions of VHS were released. VHS-C was a compact version of VHS released in 1984 that could fit into an adapter that could play on any VHS device. Super VHS was a higher quality version of VHS that was released in 1987. By 1988, Sony began producing their own VHS players.
Despite the video format wars pretty much being over by the early 1980s, Sony never totally gave up on Betamax. In 1985, they introduced Super Betamax, and in 1988, they introduced Extended Definition Betamax. Sony kept producing Betamax video recorders up until 2002, and kept producing Betamax video cassettes until March of 2016. There are some third-party companies that are still making small quantities of Betamax cassettes today.
VHS was the dominant video recording platform up until 2002 when DVD sales finally overtook tape sales. The success of VHS and the failure of Betamax wasn't the case of an inferior technology beating a superior technology. It was the case of one format delivering what they thought people wanted versus another which delivered what people actually wanted. People didn't care about minor differences in image quality on old standard definition television sets.
What they wanted was to record and play longer videos. The fact that Sony tried to control and profit off the entire Betamax ecosystem, whereas JVC made the VHS ecosystem open, also ensured that VHS would end up victorious. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakton and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.
I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server. If you'd like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes. And as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.