I’m quite younger so I wasn’t around that format war but depends on who you ask you get different responses.
No. Sony didn’t want to license the technology; JVC said fuck you we’ll license ours to everybody.
That’s all there is to it.
I swear we need an Alec signal, like the Bat signal, that we can shine when topics like this come up.
Here is a playlist is all of Technology Connections videos about the format wars. Alec does a great job explaining the history and showing things off.
TL;DW tape length and price are the main reasons. Arguably if you want to hang the win on a single reason, sports is probably the best answer. Betamax wasn’t long enough to tape a full game and Selectavision (which was doomed anyway) couldn’t record at all.
I can smell the brown and Midwesterness. Man I love his videos.
I’m also not really old enough, but I thought it was license costs (as usual with Sony).
I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.
But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.
Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.
VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.
JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.
So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.
The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).
It may have contributed to the failure of Betamax, but there several reasons for the failure of that format.
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It was expensive. From the cameras to the playback machines, even commercial distribution on Betamax tapes came with an expensive license and fee that VHS did not have.
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Betamax tapes (initially) were limited to 60 minutes. The VHS tapes were initially 120 or 180 minutes.
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Betamax machines and Betamax camcorders were much more bulky and heavier and more complicated to use than their VHS alternatives.
Despite its superior quality, Betamax came with a lot of drawbacks, all of which were the major contributors to its downfall. How much porn itself had to do with that, it’s probably not known, but it was not a major contributing factor.
Porn is probably a correlation with those other factors…
Also that quality was the only differentiation in the age of 480i seems a bit crazy to then try to get a licence fee out of it. I barely cared about the quality difference between VHS and DVD when it first came out until I got a better TV where I could actually see the difference, and I imagine the difference with beta max would be even smaller than that 😅
Edit: 480i, not 480p 😅
Back then, the TV and VHS picture quality was somewhere between 240p and 360p. Betamax was the first format available to consumers whose picture was 480p.
I did a university report on BluRay vs hddvd and successfully called the winner based on the vhs/beta case.
Essentially your point 1 affected the indie film and porn industry which struggled to afford or obtain a license. Turns out those industries were key adopters.
Except wasn’t hddvd cheaper and initially porn was using it?
Yeah sorry I am mis-remembering the report from 19 years ago. I clarified in another comment in this chain.
From what I remember, yep. I bought my roommate one of the first porn HD-DVDs and I remember specifically that blu-ray wasn’t on the porn bandwagon.
Didn’t Blu-ray win because it was basically neck and neck with the amount of studios backing HD-DVD vs Blu-ray. I think everyone was waiting to see what the final studio would pick (off the top of my head it was either Fox or Warner Bros).
Sony paid said studio basically a massive multi $m bribe to pick Blu-ray (to help promote their new console, the Playstation 3) which they duly did and that format was declared the winner.
HD-DVD would’ve been great as the winner as the specifications don’t include any form of region protection. But blurays hold more data and therefore allows for better quality encodes.
It seemed more like PS3 decided the winner to me at the time , since it came with a blue ray drive while the xb360 only came with a DVD drive and the HD-DVD drive was sold separately.
Specifically my report from 2006 notes a lack of critical studio and manufacturer support for HDDVD. To create the bluray standard, many studios and manufactures worked together to create the format, where HD-DVD had a much smaller group of people onboard from the get-go.
Additionally, the sony support of BluRay in the PS3 at effectively no cost to the consumer meant that such a large population would have the required equipment on hand.
Blurway also had a higher density disc, which was critical to the longevity of the platform.
My report didnt actually cover licensing, so i am definitely mis-remembering on that.
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Was around during the time an I can say with absolute certainty all things Sony including the Betamax products were smaller with a better overall user design (think buttons and external displays). Sony was just better than most every company when it came to analog video and portable audio.
Regarding licensing fees, consumers rarely saw those fees because they were mostly renting movies. Few people ever mastered the art of recording television shows in the US (fewer purchased recorders). And when they did it was oftentimes while they were at home. Literally everyone of that generation had a VHS whose clocked flashed because the owner could not set the time. I mention this because setting the time was required if you wanted to plan a recording while you were away from home.
I mention all of this because these machines were used by a generation who never utilized them for anything other than renting videos and recording while at home.
Beta lost because of marketing and the lack of choice among Betamax devices (this is where the licensing came to play).
If the person making the audio/video choices was technical or an audiophile they purchased a Betamax.
Not to be overly critical but that generation relied heavily on marketing to make those types of purchasing decisions. Product quality or the feature set could be easily overshadowed by dynamic marketing.
Regarding porn, there was porn on video but during the VHS/Betamax period most porn was in magazine form.
Huh, that sounds very different from my experience. Everyone taped from TV, and traded tapes, even people who couldn’t set the time or schedule it. People were so desperate for time-shifting away from TV broadcast schedule and to share videos that they sat through entire shows to record them. There were frequent glitches from people trying to not record commercials, before commercial skipping technology became common. This was also the only reasonable way to have a movie collection, given the obscene prices of movies on tape. And of course child me thought I was clever to figure out how to schedule a recording, only to be frequently screwed up by sports and political events running long - I’d schedule an extra hour and sometimes that wasn’t enough
you are not the first one asking the question
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=vhs+vs+beta+vs+porn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Contributing_factors
I don’t think they posted on Lemmy to get search results
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