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).