Word: betamaxes
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Sony's troubles stem from a disastrous slump in sales of its Betamax videotape recorder, which in 1983 accounted for 41% of the company's sales. Last week Zenith announced that it would no longer sell Sony's machine under its brand name. Zenith thus joins companies such as Toshiba and NEC that have abandoned Sony's videotape system in favor of the VHS method developed by archrival Matsushita (1982 sales: $15.7 billion), which sells products in the U.S. under the National, Quasar and Panasonic brand names. Says one industry watcher in Tokyo: "Zenith...
...people make copies of their favorite television programs or play tapes of movies on their TV screens. Two years later Matsushita announced a cheaper recorder that worked on a rival technology, known as VHS, which used different-size tapes and made recordings for up to six hours, while the Betamax machine could play for only three hours. The longer tapes were particularly popular with sports fans who wanted to record football or baseball games. Matsushita then outmaneuvered Sony by adding extra features to its recorders, providing licenses to other companies that wanted to enter the business and concluding aggressive marketing...
...that was later to become known as Sony was getting excited about a new invention from the U.S. called the transistor, MITI chose to help two other firms engaged in making soon-to-be-obsolete vacuum tubes. MITI also had no say in Sony's decisions to market Betamax videocassette recorders and Walkman portable stereos, two of the company's fastest-selling products. Japan is the leading manufacturer of industrial robots, but MITI played no role in financing their development...
...homemade copies. Overall, the industry figures that it loses $1 billion in sales annually to home tapers. A bill in Congress that would put a royalty fee on tape and recorder sales is being held up, pending a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Sony Betamax case on the home videotaping of television programs...
...revolution. Time Inc.'s fledgling pay-TV company, Home Box Office, bounced a clear video signal off a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the earth, paving the way for national cable networks; and Sony introduced the U.S. consumer to the first successful home videocassette recorder, the Betamax, thus freeing the viewer from indentured servitude to network scheduling whims. By 1977 the portents were becoming clear: HBO broke into the black, and the networks suffered the first erosions in their share of the total audience...