Surprising Everyone, Betamax Finally Loses the Format War to VHS

Callate

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My family's first VCR was Betamax. But I have to say I never noticed the damnedest bit of difference between its quality and VHS. Admittedly I was a relatively young kid at the time, but still; the only time we noticed the quality was when the tracking was off or the stupid machine was trying to eat your tape.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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gigastar said:
I can only imagine they were making them to order, and now the orders have all dried up.

Thats the only reasonable explanation.
Probably. On the other hand, you can still find electronic stores and well-stocked groceries that sells cassette tapes, you know the thing that went obsolete in the late-90's when the CD became a thing, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small market for Betamax outside of to-order manufacture. Old technology often has a surprising longevity when it comes to people continuing its' usage.
 

xxobot

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008Zulu said:
Oh man, North Korea just got Betamax! Now what will they do?
The same thing they do every night - try to take over the world!

OT. I'm still mourning the loss of 5 1/2 floppies, and now this? What is the world coming to?
 

Dalisclock

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Knight Captain Kerr said:
Wow, I just assumed it went out of production before the turn of the century.

I remember there's an episode of Cowboy Bebop which is set in the 2070s where the characters find a Betamax tape and the characters have the reaction that they should have. Namely, what the hell is this? Wait, why doesn't it work in a VHS?
That's what I thought of when I heard this story. They don't know the difference between formats, don't particularly care when the guy at the tech shop tries to explain it to them and to top it off, Spike responds to a tape tracking error by kicking the tape player(nearly causing the guy running the shop to have a heart attack).

Good times.
 

Steve the Pocket

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Wait, "Video Home System"? I guess I just never bothered to look up what it stood for until now; that's some 1980s-anime-title level of broken English right there.
 

Middle_Index

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Oh my god, ive lost so much money... its been so long i dont remember who i placed the best with but i was still holding out hope Betamax would pull it back.
 

FPLOON

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DaWaffledude said:
As someone born in 1997...

What the hell is a Betamax?
I think this should help... Then again, I think your reaction would be more like this video's thumbnail afterwards...
 

Something Amyss

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PatrickJS said:
JVC's format, however, had a tremendous ally on their side: the porn industry.
Well, except not. JVC's format was cheaper and lacked the standards restrictions. This meant they had the porn industry, yes, but also a serious number of studios in the commercial market which is what ended up tipping the scales in terms of support. There is limited evidence that the porn industry had a significant effect here or in the HD format war.

Also, Sony screwed themselves pretty hard by making intial Betamax cassettes capable of recording only a single hour. The cost and length were huge factors.

It's a fun meme, but it's not remotely accurate.

Bindal said:
Pretty sure, some movie makers were still sticking to Betamax as their format, hence why it was also still produced. Now with almost everything digital, the only customers left have probably also disappeared over the remaining years...

So, I am not too surprised that Betamax tapes were still made.
I'm pretty sure we're talking non-commercial anyway.

CrystalShadow said:
Yeah... This is less of a surprise than you'd think.

VHS won in the home space, but Betamax was used extensively in professional production environments.

Given the nature of needing to convert old material, deal with old equipment and such, that actually makes me think there's more incentive overall to keep Betamax going as a format than there is VHS.
There's still a ubiquity to VHS in terms of security and the like. I know a good chunk of places haven't gone digital yet, and lower quality but longer play is fine for their purposes. This could quite possibly make them more beneficial than tapes for legacy systems.

Gethsemani said:
Probably. On the other hand, you can still find electronic stores and well-stocked groceries that sells cassette tapes, you know the thing that went obsolete in the late-90's when the CD became a thing, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small market for Betamax outside of to-order manufacture. Old technology often has a surprising longevity when it comes to people continuing its' usage.
Not to mention floppies. You can still buy a 3.5" or 5" floppy disk reader pretty readily, and put anything that will fit on 1.44 MB of storage (or less).
 

Thaluikhain

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All the best comments have been taken...the "They still made these?" from more or less every news source about it, so...oh wait, got one:

"We will tape over him. With the snooker."
 

Loonyyy

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Knight Captain Kerr said:
Queen Michael said:
Great. Just great. Now how am I gonna watch movies?
Why Laserdisc of course!
And when they run out, you can trade up to HD-DVD!

Or if you're looking something more portable, UMD seems like it'll be sticking around for a good while!
 

Redlin5_v1legacy

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I think the Betamax division was the Siberia of Sony.

"Oh, I don't like you Steve. I'm going to promote you. To the head of Betamax."