VHS and Beta. The history (moved from diffrent thread)

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › VHS and Beta. The history (moved from diffrent thread)

Jughead

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#12584 26-Mar-2007 14:17

Hey, this came out of a thread which was talking about CDMA vz GSM. I am moving all the posts here :)

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Jughead

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#65015 26-Mar-2007 14:21

Jughead:

many people have compared GSM / CDMA with BETA/VHS

BETA is the surperior technology and is still used in the television industry today but VHS won with superior distrubution and marketing...

DylanReeve:

VHS won because of porn. Sony refused to allow pornographic content to be released on Betamax. If you wanted porn you had to buy VHS.

As far as I know you can probably access porn with GSM or CDMA, so there's no comparison.

And, as an aside, the Beta technologies used in television (BetacamSP, BetacamSX and Digital Betacam) are pretty far removed from the Betamax of old. A better example would be that Betamax technology

Jughead:

That's why they call this place geekzone, I learn something new everyday :)

good old porn aye, it built the internet to

Timestyles:

I'm not so sure on that. I recall reading a brochure from a porn video store (as you do) in about '86 that said that some videos came out only in Beta, and wondering why, since the VHS/Beta war was almost over by then.

My understanding was that when Beta came out, the size of the cassettes meant that you couldn't record 2 hours on it, until later on when the tape thickness reduced to allow it. That may have reduced desirability for some early customers.

DylanReeve:
ony may have changed their position on it later, but originally they were not allowing Betmax to be used for porn. As such the porn industry adopted VHS for their home-video distribution. Home-video caused an explosion in porn (until then you had to go to a 'cinema' to see it, largely) and was a big boost for VHS.

As for the Beta time limitation - the cassette were originally 1 hour, they managed to increase them to 2-hours and later got them to nearly 4 hours, but the sacrifices to achieve that length came at a price with regard to quality (in the same way that VHS Long Play cuts the quality of VHS). The way Beta was recorded way genuinely better than VHS, but as we all know, for the home market quality isn't necessarily the deciding factor (in fact often it's not).

Any views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer Telecom NZ

Jughead

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#65016 26-Mar-2007 14:22

Juha
This should be in a thread of its own, and not hijack the Telecom/Voda co-lo one, but... the VHS owing its success to porn is I believe a myth. In order for theory to hold, there would have to be a large, existing user base of VHS owners wanting to buy mostly porn driving the adult industry, something that clearly wasn't the case.

Betamax was in fact the biggest format, but Sony didn't play nicely with other Japanese makers that turned to an alternative format - VHS. A comparison between the locked-in and proprietary Apple Macintosh design and the open, PC architecture is more apt. Then there was the issue of recording time: VHS offered four hours, but Sony didn't want to do that with Betamax, which was stuck at one hour only.

DylanReeve:

Sony's fondness for proprietary format has been problematic for them many times, and certainly was then too - but I have no trouble believing that the porn connection played a big part in bringing us that the oh-so-excellent VHS format.

...I think I've finished now...

Any views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer Telecom NZ

juha

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#65018 26-Mar-2007 15:14

Good move :)

Juha

Nightwyrm

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#65042 26-Mar-2007 16:23

Juha: Sony didn't play nicely with other Japanese makers that turned to an alternative format

It'll be interesting to see if history repeats itself. 25 years from now... "anyone remember Blu-Ray?" Maybe if Sony release a whole lotta porn on Blu-Ray, their format will prevail.

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juha

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#65044 26-Mar-2007 16:32

Don't think so... we have teh Intarweb now.

Juha

cokemaster

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#65045 26-Mar-2007 16:36

Indeed - with increasing broadband speeds, is there really a need for physical disks anymore?

Apart from the DRM sticking point - I would be quite happy to download stuff providing it is of reasonable quality and size.

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bradstewart

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#65053 26-Mar-2007 17:09

I think there is a need for disks still, imagine trying to download an HD movie. Theres 30Gb gone, more than double the data caps most people have.