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Betamax wasn’t any more proprietary than VHS which was developed by JVC. It has a fairly large number of manufacturers that produced VCRs including NEC, Toshiba
by dogma1138 6y ago
Betamax wasn’t any more proprietary than VHS which was developed by JVC. It has a fairly large number of manufacturers that produced VCRs including NEC, Toshiba, Aiwa and Pioneer the issue was mainly cost and the fact that Betamax cam recorders could not be miniaturized as efficiently and as cheaply as VHS so you ended up with a two stage solution still for home movies and amateur movie production (porn played a big role here).
- kmeisthax 6y ago>porn played a big role here Beta had porn. Furthermore, that's not how home video worked. VHS and Beta were sold on their TV recording capabilities, not their home video libraries. Home video was supposed to be handled by disc formats (Laserdisc, CED, VHD, etc); selling movies on $100-ish tapes was prohibitively expensive compared to ~$15 discs. Eventually this was worked around with video rental shops and falling prices of VHS tape, but a consequence of this is that neither Sony nor JVC were licensing content for distribution on their tapes. Remember, you could record whatever you wanted on the tape; that was the point.
- dogma1138 6y agoBy home movies I mean replacing the super 8 format. The design behind VHS made camcorders cheaper to make as well as enabled them to be used to play video. Betamax at the time had a more complicated solution where a separate player was needed and also initially a two stage solution where different tapes had to be used.