
The Betamax vs. VHS Format War - tosh
http://www.mediacollege.com/video/format/compare/betamax-vhs.html
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avree
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.

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chimeracoder
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/)

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bitJericho
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.

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Someone1234
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.

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bitJericho
Blu-ray DRM is incredibly simple to bypass. In 20 or 30 years when the
collection will still be worth a couple bucks at a garage sale, DRM free
players will be the norm.

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davidw
This book has a great treatment of the underlying economics of 'information
goods' if you're interested in this kind of thing and want something a bit
(well, a lot) more thorough.

[http://www.amazon.com/Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-
Ec...](http://www.amazon.com/Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-
Economy/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20)

One of the authors is now the chief economist at Google. I highly recommend
it.

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jamesbrownuhh
Terrible article. Lots of things happened, many people said this, nobody
knows, etc.. Complete waste of time.

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nivals
Great video on YouTube that looks at the engineering/design of the players and
some of the other reasons for VHS winning the battle such as the rise of video
rentals on VHS.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ)

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kazinator
So it was basically a match between Japanese formats. The fatter, heftier 3
hour VHS easily performed "oshidashi" on the little 60 minute Betamax,
throwing it out of the ring with one shove, thereby claiming the "yokozuna"
title.

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Aloha
Betamax lost largely on licensing, VHS was licensed very very cheaply, Beta
was not.

