A little more history:
Fall 1976: Sony brings to market a TV with a built in Betamax for
$2,300
Spring 1977: Sony sells just the Betamax VCR for $1,400
Summer 1977: RCA introduces the VHS Selectavision for $1,000;
Panasonic sells their equivalent VHS for $1,095
November 1977: Zenith's Betamax clone goes on sale for $994; Sony
reduces its Betamax to $1,095
Apart from a very brief period in mid-1997, their were no major
differences in price between VHS and Betamax hardware. As the market
developed and more licensees came on board on both camps, Sony went
after the mid- and high-end Beta market while Sanyo pursued the low-
end, and with VHS Panasonic/Matsushita went mid- and high end and RCA
went low-end. I can find no evidence of a major price differential
between VHS and Beta until the late 1980's and beyond when the bulk of
VCR production moved from Japan to Korea and VHS prices dropped so low
that they practically took VCRs into the disposable category. By that
time VHS was by far the dominant format. So, the price differential
between VHS and Beta wasn't the cause of Beta's demise, but rather was
a consequence of VHS's triumph and the economies of scale of the
market transitioning to almost all-VHS .
I completely defer to your experience of studio politics and
practices, of which I have no knowledge, but even if retailers made
more money off of VHS titles vs Beta, the end price to consumers was
the same irrespective of the format. In any case, the format war was
won by VHS during the time when the market for purchasing movies was
virtually non-existent as the studios were pricing their titles for
sale to rental establishments, and rental prices were the same for
both formats. By the time Paramount came out with the first "name"
title at what was then considered a sell-through price ($39.95 if I
remember correctly) the format war was already over - Sony just hadn't
acknowledged it.
In my opinion, Beta lost to VHS because Sony always put video quality
ahead of maximum recording time, and the mass market always did the
reverse. TVs were small in those days and VCRs were mostly connected
via the an antenna port such that the difference in quality was less
obvious. Betamax eventually topped out at 4.5 hours vs 6 hours for
VHS (I'm not counting the times with the unreliable, extended length
super-thin tapes from both camps). It was always the format with the
shortest recording time and they were never able to convince the
market that the increased quality was worth the price.
Colin
On Mar 3, 2008, at 1:36 PM, Craig Miller wrote:
I'll bow to you that I confused the Copyguard name with Macrovision.
And you're also correct that when I said Beta I was speaking of
Betacam
-- though it was frequently just referred to as Beta by people using
the
cameras, it was more correctly called Betacam and I'd forgotten that.
But Betamax recorders were definitely more expensive than VHS
recorders for a number of years. And not by just $20 or $40. I never
said anything about the retail prices of pre-recorded tapes. I was
talking
about wholesale. Also, in addition to individual pricing,
distributors
frequently "bundled" their product -- cutting per unit price if you
bought
multiples or cutting prices if you purchased multiple titles. This
was much
more heavily done with VHS than with Betamax format tapes, keeping the
same retail and official wholesale prices but making it far more
profitable
for a retailer to carry the VHS versions.
Craig.
Who'll freely admit his memory isn't perfect.
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