Word: jvc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week a new high roller appeared on the scene when JVC, the Japanese consumer-electronics company that developed the VHS format for videocassettes, said it will spend more than $100 million to launch Largo Entertainment, a filmmaking company to be run by veteran producer Lawrence Gordon (Die Hard, Field of Dreams). JVC will give Gordon, 53, a former president of 20th Century Fox Films, a free hand in managing the new company while splitting the profits evenly with him. Gordon plans to make three movies in 1990 and five to eight pictures a year thereafter...
Besides any direct earnings from the films, JVC hopes to get new programming that it can sell on videocassettes. Company officials also want to learn more about the movie business, possibly as a prelude to buying a major film studio. Says Gordon: "They have no experience in the business and regard this as their tuition...
...technologies, their companies often fail to follow up. The genesis of the videocassette recorder is a classic case in point. The basic technology for the VCR was invented at a California-based company called Ampex and developed further at R.C.A. Yet it was two Japanese companies -- Sony and JVC -- that bought rights to the technology and modified it. After 10,000 patented improvements, they made the VCR an affordable household product...
Sony officials probably knew they were in trouble years ago, when consumers began to use the terms VHS and VCR interchangeably. The company had made a crucial mistake. While at first Sony kept its Beta technology mostly to itself, JVC, the Japanese inventor of VHS, shared its secret with a raft of other firms. As a result, the market was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the VHS machines being produced. In just the first year of VHS, Sony lost 40% of the VCR business to the upstart competition. By 1987 VHS accounted for more than...
...adapter that will play it back on a conventional VHS recorder. In contrast, the Beta version will record up to two hours on a standard Beta tape, but it cannot be used to play back the cassette. The chief advantage of the VHS camcorder, sold by Zenith and JVC, is that it comes equipped with an electronic view finder that is actually a tiny (one-inch-square) black-and-white TV mounted on the side of the camera. This setup allows the user to instantly review what has just been taped. It also has a fade control, so that amateur...