50 years of video recorders: Sony's Betamax as a successful failure

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While numerous streaming services make moving image entertainment available anytime and anywhere thanks to smartphones today, the media industry was quite different in the 1970s. In addition to radio and daily newspapers, linear television was a constantly growing market worldwide, but it had one major disadvantage for consumers: they were strictly bound to broadcast times and program guides. Once you missed a program, the best you could hope for was a repeat.

This is exactly where Sony came into play in June 1975 by launching "Betamax", a format for time-controlled recording and subsequent viewing. The technology was derived from U-Matic, which was intended for professional use: A magnetic tape is pulled out of a cassette using a complicated mechanism, wrapped around a head drum, and the combination of its rotation and the tape speed produces the necessary bandwidth for the video and audio signal. All later formats for video recorders, especially the market leader VHS (Video Home System), also worked with this technology. And the format also gets its name from the way the tape is pulled out: In the recorder, the tape looks like the Greek letter beta.

Full concentration on television formats

This VHS was not launched on the market until a year later by Sony's Japanese competitor JVC –, so Sony would actually have had a good chance of setting the standard. From today's perspective, the fact that this ultimately failed and VHS prevailed is due to a fatal misjudgment of what users actually wanted to do with the devices. As an advertisement for one of the first devices from 1977 shows, Sony concentrated entirely on content produced for television. In other words: series, news and magazine programs. All with a typical running time of one hour, which was also the running time of the first beta cassettes. One program, one tape - great for Sony if it meant that plenty of cassettes could be sold. It wasn't until years later that 90 and 120-minute lengths were also available thanks to thinner tape material.

How Sony stumbled across football

What had been overlooked: sport. In the USA, already the largest television market in the world at the time, sports broadcasts were the big hit. And in the national sport par excellence, football, a television broadcast was already more than two hours long in the mid-1970s. Here, in particular, time-shifted television – including skipping the commercials – would have been appealing. But if you have to be at home to change the cassette anyway, you might as well watch the game live.

This is probably why JVC launched its VHS with two-hour cassettes, so it didn't matter that the Betamax cassettes were slightly smaller than the VHS tapes. Although Sony was to use this for the first camcorder, it was a bad start for the emerging format war. Although 90-minute cassettes were quickly followed by thinner tape material, the first VHS recorders with "Long Play" (LP) appeared as early as 1977. This made it possible to record four hours of footage on one cassette at a greatly reduced quality, and thus finally the entire football match.

The camcorder that can't play anything

Sony followed suit with "Beta II", like VHS-LP at half the tape speed, i.e. three hours on a 90-minute cassette. The old recordings and the cassettes remained compatible. And in 1983, the first combination of recorder and camera in one device, the camcorder, appeared. Again, you might have thought that Sony was strengthening its format with this, but no way: The format called "Betamovie" recorded on beta cassettes – but could not play them back. Sony had made the head drum half the size to keep the device small. However, for the same tape speed, this meant that the tape would wrap around almost 360 degrees, creating a gap which, thanks to analog tricks – explained in this YouTube video by Technology Connections – had no effect on playback. This means that the recordings from the Betamovie can be played back on a Betamax recorder. However, the camcorder can neither show pre-recorded tapes nor its own recordings. A bit of a bummer, for example, when you're on vacation and want to watch the day's recordings in your accommodation. This was not a great improvement on the established – and cheaper – Super 8 cameras. Nevertheless, Betamovie laid the foundation for the later success of the Beta format in the professional sector.