http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=2512
But the reason for my question comes here:
So, was porn the reason why VHS triumphed over Beta?
This is the official version of why VHS won:
[ul]
[li]VHS fit more on a tape. This alone pretty much knocked Beta out of contention. The original Beta tapes could only hold an hour of video.[/li][li]The quality differences were imperceptable on home gear. This is probably the most contentious thing I’ll say in a while. 
Videophiles should remember, however, that most people at the time had rather crappy TVs and whatever gains Beta bought you were wasted on low-end tubes and speakers.[/li][li]Sony had troubles licensing the format. This is what Sony’s founder, Akio Morita, said in his autobiography.[/li][/ul]
An article from The Guardian on this topic.
I’ll second Derleth’s reasons and add that the porn industry’s embrace was no more than possibly a nail in Beta’s coffin. Additionally, the lack of licensed Beta players made VHS players cheaper since you had the rest of the consumer video electronics industry arrayed against Sony in a price war.
I third it. I remember reading the book Fast Forward about the rise of the VCR. In it the author says that the Sony engineers placed too much emphasis on insisting that the Beta cartridge be no bigger than a paperback book.
Sony also thought that ‘time-shifting’, i.e. recording TV shows for playback later, would be the primary use for potential owners of VCRs, not playing pre-purchased (or, at the time, the insane idea of rented) videos. And since almost all TV shows are either only a half or one hour the initial one hour maximum with Beta didn’t seem like a big deal.
On the more technical side, Sony not only though that the slightly higher picture quality would matter a lot more they also prefered their ‘U-loading’ system where the tape is pulled from the cassette at only one point and wrapped around the video drum (this is why the progenitor of the home VCR, the industrial Sony U-Matic, was called that). It was simpler and put less stress on the tape than VHS’s M-loading design where the tape is pulled around the drum from two points.
Being interested in the technical side I felt bad reading how Sony’s placing technical prowness and an informed consumer above marketing savy wound up costing them the horserace. But it was neat how about a decade later Sony’s 8mm trounched the kludgey VHS-C for these reasons…
And, just for the record, porn wasn’t any harder to find on Betamax tapes than any other sort of movie.
Could anyone clarify on this point of Betamax tapes only lasting an hour? I was young when they were about, but I watched a fair few of these tapes, and I never remember having to change tapes half-way through a feature-length film - the Guardian article says “Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour” - did they reduce the length of tapes at some point to this pitiful length, or are my childhood memories just plain wrong?
The original Beta I format only supported one hour. Later formats increased the recording time. IIRC, BetaIII supported up to four hours. VHS offered two hour recording from the beginning and it didn’t take long for ELP/SLP to extend that to six hours, useful for getting a whole afternoon of college football when you had to work on Saturdays.
My dad obviously stuck with Beta 'til the advanced lengthy tapes came out then. Thanks, sewalk.
It wasn’t just the tapes; the player had to support the longer play modes (by running the tape at a slower speed, reducing picture quality). The affinity consumers showed for the longer-playing formats proved that Beta’s qualitative advantages just weren’t that important.
As one who was working in the TV/video industry at the time of the “war” between VHS and Beta, let me offer some insights from my experience and observations at the time.
Among engineers and video “purists” it was generally acknowledged that Betamax was technologically superior to VHS from a picture quality and engineering standpoint. Sony’s big mistake was that they stubbornly refused to license the technology and insisted that if you wanted Betamax you had to buy it from Sony.
Meanwhile, the VHS specification was developed as an industry standard and freely made available to all manufacturers, so that the market was flooded with low-cost VHS players competing with Sony’s higher priced Betamax. Guess which one the public flocked to?
There are many observers who point to parallels in the PC/Mac battle.
Well, I hear Apple is going to start using Intel-based hardware in their computers, so maybe this will lower the cost on the hardware side of the equation (even if they still use a proprietary OS, which is just fine with me, MacOS has a few neat tricks that Windows doesn’t, and vice vers)
Notes: The longest classic Beta format, Beta III, could record 4:45 (and usually at least 4:50) on an L-740 tape. There were also L-830 tapes but they were too thin and jammed. That’s plenty long enough for most recording purposes and was higher quality than VHS SP as well.
Note that most pre-recorded movies came in VHS SP and Beta II. Both of which held two hours. (And the latter being far higher quality too.)
Also, as to prices, they really weren’t that more expensive for most of the format war. And in fact, when comparing feature to feature, they were infinitely cheaper. When I bought my SL-HF300, it had stereo HiFi and skipscan. VHS had only Dolby (!!!) at the time and no skipscan at all. (In fact, 2 of my newer VHS machines still didn’t come with it.) So no matter how much you spent at the time, you couldn’t get a VHS VCR comparable to the SL-HF300.
Sony did allow others to make Betas. I have owned Betas made by Sanyo and Toshiba. (My Zenith is an OEM Sony and I had a Radio Shack model that was OEM Sanyo.)
It came down to 2 issues:
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Sony thought that quality would win out. Both with other makers and with US consumers. Price became an issue only later when economy of scale hit.
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6 vs. “4” (again, 4:45) which is really just a cassette size issue.
The pre-recorded market just wanted one format, it didn’t matter to them which one. The studios hated Sony and some suspect they “helped” behind the scenes encourage VHS for pre-recorded.
I swear, it typed “L-750” and not “L-740”.
“Future “Mactel” computers will have specially designated Intel chips, not generic x86 compatible chips found in common PCs.”
Maybe a step toward a long-term goal of using standard x86 hardware, but we won’t see Windows and MacOS on the same machine just yet.
Back in the late 80’s early 90’s I worked with a hardcore (pun intended) Beta holdout. He had an extensive collection of commercially produced, beta format, porn. If Sony was trying to keep it’s format “clean” then there must have been some de-facto workaround.
Thanks for the replies guys.
My BS metter was acting a little when I read that article, I needed to verify it and I see that I was not mistaken, thanks again.
Years ago I was told by the video rental man that one reason VHS became so popular was because the rental market honed in on VHS. For a while it was possible to rent Betamax tapes but then were more and more films coming out on VHS (I assume they were cheaper to produce), so people began buying the VHS machines.
A complete aside… When video first came out we used to rent the cassette and the machine.
I wonder if Sony is going to make the same mistake with the next gen DVD’s. From what I understand, there are two formats competing to be the market standard. Sony’s “Blu-Ray”, and HD-DVD. Regardless of whether or not the pron industry decided who won in terms of VHS vs. Beta, I am convinced that whatever next-gen DVD format the pronm industry chooses, that WILL be the one of choice. Hell, I think the porn industry is one of the few places that really utilize DVD’s features. What movies, besides pron and maybe The Matrix, actually use the multiple angle feature? Imagine, with HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray,) not only can you have mutiple agnles, you can push a button and have different actors! 
That parallel has already happened.
Most engineers would argue that IBM’s micro channel was technologically superior to the motherboard bus of that time (and still pretty much the same now). But it failed for much the same reasons.
- incompatible with existing boards.
- it required better (more expensive) boards.
- IBM owned it. (Unlike Sony, they would license it – but for a fee).
- independent manufacturers didn’t want to depend on a standard owned by a competitor.
So the IBM-compatible makers just ‘stayed away in droves’, and continued with the old open-standard bus. And the market went with them, and IBM’s micro channel architecture was soon left behind by everyone, even IBM.
I’ve heard that Beta still flourishes in the professional TV station world. Can anyone confirm this? If true, it would seem to have bucked the VHS-consumer trend of years ago.