Word: betamaxes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sony has not made many major blunders, but the way it marketed Betamax was a beaut. The famed Japanese electronics firm started a home-entertainment revolution when it introduced Betamax, the original home-videocassette recorder, in 1975. Before long, however, competitors arrived in force with another type of VCR, dubbed VHS, which offered buyers more recording capacity. Sony gradually lost all but a tiny fraction of one of the richest markets in the consumer electronics business. Last week Sony said it will begin selling VHS players, in addition to Beta models, later this year. Inevitable as the move may have...
While both types of recorder are fairly simple to use, there are differences in the technology. Most important, tapes for one machine cannot be played on the other kind; the VHS cassettes are larger. Proponents of the Betamax format insisted all along that its picture quality was superior to what VHS offered, but most consumers either did not know that or did not care. Says Leonard White, president of Orion Home Video: "Beta is the perfect example of a better technology being outgunned by consumer preference...
Where does the Sony decision leave the 20 million U.S. owners of Betamax machines? Most likely on the road to that vast consumer-electronics graveyard where orphaned home computers and other gadgets go. Though Sony says it will not stop producing Beta machines or tapes, industry experts are skeptical about the format's prospects. Says Makoto Tamaki, an electronics analyst at the Industrial Bank of Japan: "Someone who is going to buy a new recorder is likely to choose a VHS. There is the anxiety that Sony might stop making Beta...
Owner of both a Sony Betamax and a Scott VHS, Marcus Henzer '89 agrees that watching films on tape has taken the place of going to the movies. "It's much more of a social activity--you can stop, rewind, fast forward. Unlike in a theater, you always feel free to talk," he says...
...stages of the regime, such alternative press took the form of small newspapers that operated from day to day under the constant threat of closure or arrest or paramilitary terrorism. But throughout the whole Marcos regime, there was always what may be described as the "Xerox media" and the "Betamax media." News items and opinion columns in U.S. newspapers and magazines were widely photocopied, and U.S. national newscasts were lifted in videocassettes, smuggled into the Philippines and reproduced over and over again by innumerable and spontaneous networks of Filipinos hungering for the truth...