Remember 1975? It was an era long before DVD’s and Blu-ray-disks when video tape recorders made their entrance into many people’s homes. Back then there was a wide variety of recorders, Sony’s Betamax, Philips’ Video 2000 and JVC’s VHS. The worst of these 3 were without a doubt VHS. Yet everybody ended up with a VHS recorder in their home… it became by far the most popular option. Why? Porn!
Sony and Philips both refused to let pornographers put adult material on their tapes. JVC didn’t care. So in the rental shows (yes, people used to go out to a shop to rent videos, which you had to turn back in after a week or so, and you got a fine if you forgot to rewind the tape!) the only porn related material was only available on VHS.
Philips ‘learned’ from this. When they came out with their CD-i, which was like a predecessor of today’s DVD and Blu-ray, back in 1991, the first contract they signed was with Playboy. A few years later the internet became widely available… with one little site called ‘The Hun’s Yellow Pages’ which started a whole new era… now you know!
I saw your prosting on VHS vs Beta and just wanted to add my recollections.
OK, this is from memory from a LONG time ago, in a galaxy far far away…
While the porn issue was part of the problem with Beta vs VHS, allowing it wasn’t the sole deciding factor.
I acquired my Sony SL-7200 Beta I unit late 1978 and used it strictly for TV time shift viewing. In 1981, I acquired an SL-8200 unit with Beta I/II support (Beta II gave me 3 hours with an L-750 tape) that was non-functional and repaired it.
I personally picked up Beta versions of 800 Fantasy Lane and Marilyn Chambers Never a Tender Moment in Beta format, I believe I got them either late 1980 or early 1981. It may have been as late as 1982 however. I joined a ‘video club’ in NYC that allowed ‘trade in’ of tapes for an inexpensive fee, or purchase of their tapes. It was a long time ago, but I seem to recall $60 to buy, and $15 to trade-in. And there was a ‘membership fee’ of course. In fact, I still have both those tapes somewhere in the closet. Don’t have a way to play them, however.
Anyway… As I said, I was getting porn prior to 1982 in Beta format.
The VHS vs Beta issue was related to a number of things. One was that Sony, until the mid-1980’s, refused to license Beta technology to other manufacturers. At one point, you could go into a video store and see as many as 17 brands of VHS decks and see one Beta, Sony. Sony even tried to play that up, advertising in the early 1980’s as “Sony, the one and only”. It was amazing that Beta managed to hold onto a 4:1 (reportedly) customer ratio. In Hollywood, among video people, Beta was a HUGE winner, which led to it’s downfall. The format was far superior to VHS, but that superiority killed it.
Allegedly, early on, it was discovered that you could modify or purchase high speed dubbing decks for VHS, but they never showed up for Beta. As a result, VHS tapes could be reproduced by small shops at faster than realtime. Beta no such luck.
Another issue was the ‘copy’ protection for VHS. Early forms of copy protection prevented VHS tapes from being duplicated from rentals. Beta however never had a good copy protection in the early years. To make it even more detrimental, you could copy a protected VHS tape to Beta and it would play fine. (I was also told it wouldn’t even copy back to VHS, but you could copy to another Beta.) Customers who owned 2 decks wouldn’t own two VHS or two Beta, they would usually buy one of each, since they were still expensive at that time. Also, for technical reasons, VHS to Beta copies generally were almost as good as the VHS original but Beta to VHS copies degraded a bit, in some cases, more than just a bit. As a result, video stores saw a lot of VHS rentals, porn and otherwise, go out and people were copying to Beta for their home libraries. That, combined with the larger customer base, drove the family owned Mom and Pop video stores with an ‘adults only back room’ to only want to carry VHS, although my local small town video store carried Beta porn as late as the 1990’s, but never had the variety of new porn on Beta that it had on VHS.
Beta made a resurgence about 1984 when Sony finally licensed Beta technology to others, including Hitachi, which then quickly turned out high performance decks that just blew any VHS deck out of the water. Hitachi further made a deck for Radio Shack, I think the Model 20 for $500, as a Beta II/III stereo HiFi that was not only Beta HiFi, but even had a front panel switch to supress (I think it was) video luminence and turn the deck into an audio deck. 4.5 hours on an L-750 tape with specs that other than wow and flutter rivaled the newly available CDs for sound quality. You could use an even longer tape, the L-820, but wow and flutter on the tape got bad for audio use.
But it was too late, way too late to save Beta, the nail was in the coffin, regardless of the technical superiority of Beta over VHS.