3 ms·

Really not an interesting topic. It's been rehashed a million times, and the pornography angle just doesn't make sense. VHS cost 1/4 as much as recorded 4x as

by avree 12y ago

Really not an interesting topic. It's been rehashed a million times, and the pornography angle just doesn't make sense. VHS cost 1/4 as much as recorded 4x as long. That's why they won.

bane 12y ago
and the quality was "good enough". People didn't care if Beta looked 10% better than VHS, they were going from a state of not being able to record at all to being able to record stuff. Being longer and cheaper gave it a two out of three advantage.
- avree 12y ago
  Very true. All these articles like to herald that "Betamax was better!" but a format that's 10% better quality and costs 400% more is not actually an improvement to mosts consumers.
- CapitalistCartr 12y ago
  Certain problems are like the .50 mag problem. If someone is killed with a 9mm, they are dead. If they're killed with a hand cannon .50, are they twice as dead? This is why cops, except Dirty Harry, don't carry hand cannons. If your product is better, is it better in a way the customer will pay for? If not, it's an expense, not a feature.
  - hga 12y ago
    This is in part a "which goal do people really care about?" thing like Betamax vs. VHS. In this context, we're legally only able to stop per se, not kill, and ignoring that, we care a lot more about stopping someone before they wound or kill us than killing them. And your examples confound velocity/energy, which at handgun velocities equal (over)penetration and greater recoil, with diameter, which per the experts I prefer increases "stopping power". Therefore .40 S&W at 10 mm diameter is very popular (it's also a shorter, lower velocity 10 mm Auto developed after the FBI etc. realized that round had too much recoil), and the venerable 1904 .45 ACP at 11.5 mm is still quite popular. Many people like me use the latter in preference to rounds with a smaller diameter that can fit many more into a magazine. Like hardware video formats, network effects matter, e.g. an unpopular round won't have many guns chambered for it, and gun models designed for 9 mm can generally accommodate .40 S&W. But they're not overwhelming, it's not a winner take all domain like video tapes or analog video discs turned out to be, or better than DVD digital formats. For that matter, DVD essentially defeated a lot of other digital formats, but I'm not sure if any were near its quality and other advantages.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Also remember that we're not talking about viewing video over HDMI to a high def LCD panel, we're talking about viewing over an RF cable link to a crappy little CRT display, often badly calibrated. Under perfect conditions betamax was superior to VHS, under average viewing conditions in the typical household if you'd have done a survey asking people which video signal looked better you'd be hard pressed to get people to admit that either one was noticeably superior let alone get a consistent result showing betamax to be a better choice. It's also worth noting the costs here. In 1980 a VHS VCR cost around $800, that's $2300 adjusted for inflation. The first betamax VCRs were over $250 more expensive ($700 in today's dollars). Paying $700 more for a device which wasn't markedly superior was a sucker's bet, it's no wonder VHS was more widely adopted.
chimeracoder 12y ago
Sheer availability upon release was a huge factor as well. VHS racked up a lot of distribution and production partners before launch, which meant that there were simply far more VHS players available worldwide than Betamax players. It also didn't help at all that the Sony team really alienated people by being notoriously difficult to work with (there are plenty of stories and anecdotes about meetings with the Sony leadership at the time[0] Far more interesting is the fact that Sony learned from this experience and did everything right when it came to Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD. After all that, though, they won the standards battle (Blu-ray won out), but they lost the war[1] (the future of content delivery is likely to be neither Blu-ray nor HD-DVD, but something more akin to streaming services). [0]I have (a physical copy of) a Harvard Business School case study that describes this in detail, - there may be a digital version, but it's paywalled). [1] http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/02/sony-winning-the-dvd-battle-bu/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/02/sony-winning-the-dvd-battle-bu/
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  Another point that people forget is that Sony has nothing better to do than to make new formats for things.[0] Like 5% of startups, about 5% of Sony formats really took off. No one really remembers it, but Sony came up with Compact Discs and 3.5" floppies. PC storage in the 90s would be very different without them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_formats
- bitJericho 12y ago
  While digital content right now is a big thing, there's a lot of us that only buy physical media. I don't want to invest my hard earned money into something of no actual value. I don't buy digital downloads, I only buy on blu-ray (though I would go with dvd if something's not available on blu-ray). I don't buy mp3s or whatever else, I only buy CDs. The only thing I buy digitally is from Steam because they are far and away better than dealing with physical game media currently.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    I might have understood your argument with regards to DVDs, CDs, and so on. But when you use Blu Ray as an example I get lost. Blu Rays are inherently no more a "sure thing" than digital media, by design. Blu Ray discs when inserted both check the licence of the Blu Ray player and the Blu Ray player checks the licence of the disc. If either is "invalid" then the disc won't play (and incidentally both discs AND players have been blacklisted in mandatory updates). MP3 on the other hand is much more "free" than Blu Ray. There's no licence, there's no revocation, it "just works" and will likely always "just work" which definitely cannot be said for Blu Rays. Blu Ray is an absurdly overly complex technology. So much so that most digital content is less complex than Blu Ray by a significant amount.

by avree 12y ago

Really not an interesting topic. It's been rehashed a million times, and the pornography angle just doesn't make sense. VHS cost 1/4 as much as recorded 4x as long. That's why they won.

bane 12y ago

and the quality was "good enough". People didn't care if Beta looked 10% better than VHS, they were going from a state of not being able to record at all to being able to record stuff. Being longer and cheaper gave it a two out of three advantage.

avree 12y ago
Very true. All these articles like to herald that "Betamax was better!" but a format that's 10% better quality and costs 400% more is not actually an improvement to mosts consumers.
CapitalistCartr 12y ago
Certain problems are like the .50 mag problem. If someone is killed with a 9mm, they are dead. If they're killed with a hand cannon .50, are they twice as dead? This is why cops, except Dirty Harry, don't carry hand cannons. If your product is better, is it better in a way the customer will pay for? If not, it's an expense, not a feature.
- hga 12y ago
  This is in part a "which goal do people really care about?" thing like Betamax vs. VHS. In this context, we're legally only able to stop per se, not kill, and ignoring that, we care a lot more about stopping someone before they wound or kill us than killing them. And your examples confound velocity/energy, which at handgun velocities equal (over)penetration and greater recoil, with diameter, which per the experts I prefer increases "stopping power". Therefore .40 S&W at 10 mm diameter is very popular (it's also a shorter, lower velocity 10 mm Auto developed after the FBI etc. realized that round had too much recoil), and the venerable 1904 .45 ACP at 11.5 mm is still quite popular. Many people like me use the latter in preference to rounds with a smaller diameter that can fit many more into a magazine. Like hardware video formats, network effects matter, e.g. an unpopular round won't have many guns chambered for it, and gun models designed for 9 mm can generally accommodate .40 S&W. But they're not overwhelming, it's not a winner take all domain like video tapes or analog video discs turned out to be, or better than DVD digital formats. For that matter, DVD essentially defeated a lot of other digital formats, but I'm not sure if any were near its quality and other advantages.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Also remember that we're not talking about viewing video over HDMI to a high def LCD panel, we're talking about viewing over an RF cable link to a crappy little CRT display, often badly calibrated. Under perfect conditions betamax was superior to VHS, under average viewing conditions in the typical household if you'd have done a survey asking people which video signal looked better you'd be hard pressed to get people to admit that either one was noticeably superior let alone get a consistent result showing betamax to be a better choice. It's also worth noting the costs here. In 1980 a VHS VCR cost around $800, that's $2300 adjusted for inflation. The first betamax VCRs were over $250 more expensive ($700 in today's dollars). Paying $700 more for a device which wasn't markedly superior was a sucker's bet, it's no wonder VHS was more widely adopted.

chimeracoder 12y ago

Sheer availability upon release was a huge factor as well. VHS racked up a lot of distribution and production partners before launch, which meant that there were simply far more VHS players available worldwide than Betamax players. It also didn't help at all that the Sony team really alienated people by being notoriously difficult to work with (there are plenty of stories and anecdotes about meetings with the Sony leadership at the time[0] Far more interesting is the fact that Sony learned from this experience and did everything right when it came to Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD. After all that, though, they won the standards battle (Blu-ray won out), but they lost the war[1] (the future of content delivery is likely to be neither Blu-ray nor HD-DVD, but something more akin to streaming services). [0]I have (a physical copy of) a Harvard Business School case study that describes this in detail, - there may be a digital version, but it's paywalled). [1] http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/02/sony-winning-the-dvd-battle-bu/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/02/sony-winning-the-dvd-battle-bu/

theandrewbailey 12y ago
Another point that people forget is that Sony has nothing better to do than to make new formats for things.[0] Like 5% of startups, about 5% of Sony formats really took off. No one really remembers it, but Sony came up with Compact Discs and 3.5" floppies. PC storage in the 90s would be very different without them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_formats
bitJericho 12y ago
While digital content right now is a big thing, there's a lot of us that only buy physical media. I don't want to invest my hard earned money into something of no actual value. I don't buy digital downloads, I only buy on blu-ray (though I would go with dvd if something's not available on blu-ray). I don't buy mp3s or whatever else, I only buy CDs. The only thing I buy digitally is from Steam because they are far and away better than dealing with physical game media currently.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  I might have understood your argument with regards to DVDs, CDs, and so on. But when you use Blu Ray as an example I get lost. Blu Rays are inherently no more a "sure thing" than digital media, by design. Blu Ray discs when inserted both check the licence of the Blu Ray player and the Blu Ray player checks the licence of the disc. If either is "invalid" then the disc won't play (and incidentally both discs AND players have been blacklisted in mandatory updates). MP3 on the other hand is much more "free" than Blu Ray. There's no licence, there's no revocation, it "just works" and will likely always "just work" which definitely cannot be said for Blu Rays. Blu Ray is an absurdly overly complex technology. So much so that most digital content is less complex than Blu Ray by a significant amount.