The Sad Life and Hard Times of Betamax

The Perfect Vision, Spring 1987

In early 1987 I was working as associate editor at MART, a long-running trade monthly for TV/appliance retailers, at a moment when the VCR industry was living through the last phases of the decade-long format war between Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS, or Video Home System. I was asked by Harry Pearson, Jr., editor of The Absolute Sound, to do a deep dive for his recently-minted companion video journal, The Perfect Vision. The subject was of particular interest for TPV’s videophile audience. Although Laserdisc was clearly the format of choice for serious home video at the time, Betamax was widely considered the higher quality of the two consumer tape formats, and it was starting to show signs of strain in the marketplace. It had been losing ground to VHS for years, but my reporting showed how, like a slowly tightening tourniquet, the pressures on electronics retailers and video rental shops to maintain dual inventories reached critical mass and eventually choked Beta from the marketplace. The article, which also traces the history of how the most famous of consumer electronics format wars came to be in the first place, is an instructive lesson on why it’s so important to find industry cooperation beforehand. Nonetheless, the scenario played out again in the mid 2000’s, over a much shorter period of time, when Sony faced off against Toshiba in the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD war. That time, at least, Sony emerged the victor.