Decades Later, Some Facts About Betamax

Ever since the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war got underway and people started drawing parallels to the Betamax/VHS rivalry that started over 30 years ago, I've been amusing myself reading various misstatements about the Beta and the reasons for its defeat. However, a recent Economist article on HD DVD and Blu-ray actually made me scratch my head in puzzlement, so I figured I might as well address some things here.

I was at first amused when the article stated that the Betamax VCR "may have been technically superior to its VHS rival, but it was a dead-end design," and that "the VHS machine had a flexible concept that could be continually refined" (I don't know what that means, as both formats were extended -- SuperBeta and SuperVHS being two examples -- over the years) and that "within a couple of years, Sony’s Betamax technology had been trounced" (Beta machines were on the market for 27 years before Sony stopped producing them). More amusing, the article later states, "The Betamax lost out because, unlike the VHS machine, it couldn’t record for the full three hours needed to cover a baseball game" -- which was only true before Sony introduced the Beta-III recording mode in 1979.

So you might ask, why is this important? Well, as I said before, people are using the Betamax/VHS format war as a basis for their analysis of the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war -- so wouldn't it be kind of important if they had their facts straight? My feeling is that most of the people repeating these "facts" never owned a Betamax, or simply weren't scrutinizing events the same way they are now. The result is a decades-long version of Telephone that gradually drifts farther from reality.

Aside from the occasionally repeated myth that only Sony made Beta machines (easily refuted by a visit to BetaInfoGuide), the other often-repeated assertion is that a major factor in Beta's demise was that the adult movie industry didn't get behind it. It's an odd statement because there doesn't appear to be a shred of evidence to support it. Pick the name of any of the 1980's major porn video distributors (IMDB is good for this), google the name along with the word "Betamax," and you'll turn up all kinds of references to releases in Beta and VHS.

There are, in fact, a lot of lessons that can still be learned from Beta's travails. But we won't learn much if we're mostly getting -- and repeating -- misinformation.