Why vhs beat beta

Was the quality lost on the televisions of the era? People still argue about that. I think it depended on the TV you had. But the quality went beyond the picture and the sound. The mechanism was smoother and the action on the buttons was usually better. But that was also part of the problem. Did anyone care about that part of the experience? This gave it an immediate price advantage, and by attracting multiple manufacturers who could take their own approaches, chances were they could find other ways to drive the cost even lower.

But VHS had one more advantage: longer recording times. A football game is about 3 hours and 15 minutes long, and by , a Beta VCR could record 5 hours on a tape. But a VHS recorder could record 8 hours by then. Sony did realize they were losing, but for a time, at least they were making tons of money while they were doing it.

If you just wanted to record TV so you could watch it later, either one could do the job. Betamax was higher quality when it came to recording. But not in terms of reliability. And in the s, electronics would break occasionally, and rather than replacing them, we did indeed fix them. Neither option gave you everything. That may have slowed mass adoption. In the end, VHS won, and it won very decisively. But that tipping point took some time to reach. I think the deciding factor was when VCRs lived up to their potential as a disruptive technology.

Movie studios hated the VCR at first because they thought people would use it to copy movies. And people did. A lot. But VCRs also created a new industry and revenue stream. The market for old movies exploded. Studios could put movies on tape after their theater run ended, and people would buy them. They are also buying the confidence that their system will keep progressing even if individual manufacturers fail. In marketing terms, "the core product" - such as a car, a computer, or a video recorder - is just the start.

You have to add on all the things like reliability, service and support the expected product , its expansion capabilities the augmented product , and its potential for future development the potential product to get "the whole product". Since real people make real buying decisions based on "the whole product" and if they didn't, we'd change the model , simpleminded comparisons of products by technological feature are very likely to get it wrong.

I've been operating with the concept of "the whole product" for about a decade. That and Moore's follow up - Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge - are the two most important books ever written about hi-tech marketing. In the Valley, in the 90s, they were used as bibles.

It had a strong effect on me. When you get a new tool, you want to apply it, and I applied it. I'd spent half a decade deriding Microsoft Windows - as a user, I'd preferred Digital Research's Gem, and I was a keen supporter of open systems Unix - but it didn't take me long to work out that Windows had won.

VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on. All of this matched my own experience. I remember perambulating Hammersmith doing the Maplin run and finding VHS recorders more readily available to rent, while the video shop had three walls of VHS movies and only one for Betamax.

Indeed, the main thing that didn't fit was the idea was that Betamax was "technically superior". Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that VHS's quality was superior. I "knew" Betamax was superior -- that was the received wisdom, even at the time - and maybe it was, in a lab.

But I wasn't buying a lab test rig. In terms of "the whole product", VHS was clearly superior, so that's the way I went. Along with everybody else. Later I found out that Betamax had owned the market, but lost it because Sony got one simple decision wrong.

At least, not without proper adaptation. It's always fun to revisit old technology arguments, including Betamax vs. Here's the hardware and VHS to digital conversion software you'll need. Anina is a freelance technology and internet security writer at MakeUseOf. She started writing in cybersecurity 3 years ago in hopes of making it more accessible to the average person.

Keen on learning new things and a huge astronomy nerd. Let's take a look. What Was the Betamax vs. VHS Fight About?