Why VHS Was Better 419
otis wildflower writes "An article in the UK's Guardian describes why, in the end, VHS is better than Betamax. While this may not be terribly useful knowledge on its own, the author then makes a pretty convincing case that viewing something's success or failure purely on technical merit is not an entirely accurate way of looking at things. For better or for worse, success of new products and technologies is determined by a broad range of factors that make up "the whole product", quality being only one, and possibly a minor one at that. Kind of explains what happened to the Atari Lynx and Jaguar, dunnit?"
Not this crap again. (Score:4, Insightful)
And he minimizes the difference in image quality between the two formats, wihch is a mistake. BetaMax's image quality was, and is, much better, both initially and especially after multiple passes.
To quote a fellow Farker on this guy: I think I'll go out and purchase a cheap but popular car.
survival of the fittest (Score:5, Insightful)
in fact the term fit does have nothing to do with that, but should be interpreted as 'fitted for a certain purpose'
for example one of the reasons that windows version whatever is so popular with computer iliterate persons is that it takes you by the hand to do a lot of things, which can be a pain for power users, but not for newbies. in that sense windows is most 'fitted' for that situation, just as linux is for power users, server systems, or as BSD on powerful stable systems with 1000's of connections at a time.
other examples are software programming where C++ can be the best solution for developing algorithms, and VB for simple DB connected user interfaces.
the 'fittest' solution survives in the place where it is used at its best. C is not 'better' than VB. it is fit for other purposes than VB.
you can only talk about 'better' when two things are designed for the exact same purpose.
Interfacer.
Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
The only convincing bit was... (Score:5, Insightful)
You could record a film onto VHS... which you couldn't do with beta unless you were sitting in front of it to change the tapes halfway through.
good article (Score:3, Insightful)
also didnt know beta could not record a whole movie (never owned 8 trach either). what were they thinking? they must have known tv shows were 1/2 and 1 hours long, and that movies were longer. im sure they were not afraid of copyright violations, as they took the movie industry to court for 'consumer' rights an won. dont think they are so generous now that they own a record label.
these days sony is a grimy, sleazy company with very little to offer besides hype. i cant think of one product they have that someone else doesnt make better.
A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
Quick summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Next week we will be arguing that the best music ever composed is that which has sold the most, and that the best movie is the one which has been the highest grossing.
In summary, the best approach to creating the best new and exciting products is to recycle old ones in new packaging and market the hell out of them.
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
There whas a bit more to his argument than that:
Those sound like three quite important arguments to me, unless money is no object, you like buying hardware from a de facto monopoly, hunting for media is your idea of fun and you don't actually want to watch movies, just admire the spec.
A bit further on, he points out another specific flaw in Sony's market research:
Now I don't know a lot about the details, but would it have been that hard for Sony to provide essentially the same technology with a larger box and a longer tape? As the article continues:
And that's the basis problem with the general population who decide which products succeed by their purchasing decisions: they see technology as a means to an end, not as something to admire for its intrinsic cleverness.
If you build it they will come (Score:3, Insightful)
He says when consumers buy a technologically inferior product, they are really buying the ability to chooseand buying product support/longevity
Really? I thought the success of competing standards has always been based on two things: clout and marketing, not technical specifications. Your average consumer will choose brand X not because they've carefully weighed the benefits of it over brand Y but because they saw a really funny ad on superbowl sunday about it. Don't overestimate the average joe since what he will always buy into, is the hype.
___
Memory Stick Should Go the Way of Beta (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask the average tivo owner what quality level they select for their seinfeld reruns. VHS won because it gave people more of less, in a way. Just like McDonalds makes money hand over fist serving "food" that would make a french chef gag.
About Time! (Score:1, Insightful)
The "killer app" for the VCR was the movie, and Betamax was unable to run it. Betamax was a closed, proprietary platform that lost out to superior open standards. Beta's only claim to superiority was a couple more lines of horizontal resolution. But it wasn't a difference that you could actually perceive, like the difference between a 2.2GHz machine and a 2.4GHz one. And by 1985, that lead was gone.
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
What they seem to fail to understand is that many, if not most computer users, aren't that interested in computers, no more than they have an abiding interest in how television works. Its "what" it enables them to do, not how it does it, that counts.
Re:Quick summary (Score:1, Insightful)
For all intents and purposes, this is completely true. "Better", for a commercial product, is that mix of things which causes that product to sell in larger quantities that the competition. In the marketplace, the "best" product is simply the one that sells the most. It's largely self-referential.
Technical superiority doesn't mean that the average purchaser will buy the product, because most consumers want the best deal (ie low cost, easy support, etc), even at the expense of being bang up to date on the clever bits. Technology, for most people, IS a means to an end, not an end in it's own right, and for most people this is the right attitude. Video recorders are just a tool after all, and you should use the right tool for the job. In this case, the job is recording the maximum amount of usable video at the lowest cost. Thus VHS is (or at least was) the right tool.
V2000 was a vastly superior system to either VHS OR Beta, (8 hour tapes 4 per side, no noise bars, much higher bandwidth and so on), but died commercially for several reasons, not the least of which was cost. VHS won largely because it was 'good enough', cheaper, and had better recording time than Beta. It sold in large quantites due to low cost, and had low cost because of the large quantities sold.
"In summary, the best approach to creating the best new and exciting products is to recycle old ones in new packaging and market the hell out of them. "
Sad, but in many cases true. Look at the modern music or film industry. This approach is still used because of one overriding factor, IT WORKS!
Re:Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm. Makes me think of MP3s versus CDs. I listen to all of my music on MP3, despite having a (Sony, ironically enough!) 50 CD "jukebox".
Why do I sacrifice quality by listening to MP3s rather than CDs?
- Convenience: I can easily set up arbitrarily long, arbitrarily ordered MP3 playlists, and without the time it takes for the "jukebox" to physically chnage CDs.
- Greater selection at cheaper prices. While I do not and will not download MP3s to which I don't have a license, I can and do subscribe to emusic.com. This gives me an excellent selection of medium quality (128 kbps) MP3s, far more than I could afford as CDs -- and far more than I'd be tempted to "try out", buying CDs I might later find out didn't justify a $10-$20 price tag.
- Portability: Carrying around a portable CD player generally resulted in my listening to a single CD, over and over, as carrying additional CDs was inconvenient (see reason #1, above) and resulted in losing numerous Cds. carrying around my Archos MP3 player gives my my entire music collection (currently about 14 GBs in MP3 format) in my pocket.
- Quality: I can't easily hear the difference in quality between a CD and an MP3, even when the MP3 is piped through the (now empty) "jukebox"'s speakers. To the extent that I can hear the difference, I prefer to indulge my eclectic musical taste in quantity rather than fewer selections in quality. Your mileage will undoutedly vary.
Quality's important, don't misunderstand me. But let me chicken out by closing with a few choice cliches: Often the best is the enemy of the good, and enough (quality, ironically, not quantity) is as good as a feast, and more than enough is as bad as a surfeit.Consumers define Quality. (Score:4, Insightful)
For better or for worse, success of new products and technologies is determined by a broad range of factors that make up "the whole product", quality being only one, and possibly a minor one at that.
A very important point is that "quality" of a product is not defined by the producer but by the consommator.
This also means that what one consumer is ready to pay 100 euros for, another won't buy it for more than 80, and others not at all (latest edition of Italian-Spanish dictionary f.ex.)
What happened with Beta/VHS was that the VHS specs were made available to various constructors who competed between themselves to produce cheaper units.
Cheaper price was simply "higher quality" factor to consumers that beeing able to record on both sides of the casette. (and other features).
It is therefore just silly to say that "Quality" is a minor factor in a product's success. (Unless some monopoly company had f.ex. made deals to pre-install a VHS unit in all televisions manufactured)
You sure about that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Er...I thought the RIAA effectively taxed DAT out of the reach of consumers? Dat is only inferior because it's so damn expensive.
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
But none of those are technological reasons.
I would have thought that the storage capacity was quite an important technological criterion for a storage medium. If the technology is for home recording, and the tape it too short to record what a lot of people what to record, ie full-length films, isn't that a bit of a drawback? I have to say that I'd rather see all of a film at less than perfect quality than all but the last 20 minutes of a film at wonderful quality.
VHS better than DVD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, not directly. He does say that Wintel is the best whole product, and for many classes of users it currently is. That doesn't mean we can't change that, though.
It's also interesting to apply the whole product anaysis to infrastructure services. For many services, Linux or UNIX of some flavour is clearly the best whole product. It comes with the infrastructure services you need as standard (mail servers, DNS servers, etc), and there's a huge support network of people out there using these UNIX tools in a native UNIX environment. Yes, you *can* run these tools under Wintel, but Linux/UNIX is the best whole product.
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I suppose that's a problem, except that technology - no matter how intrinsically clever - is useless as an 'end'. Technology is a means to an end; your mom does not care how beautiful the DeCSS algorithm is when written in three lines of Perl. That is not a bad thing. I don't care, either. Does it WORK? Quickly? Do what I want? that's much more important. Idolizing the intrinsic technological beauty of things while discounting their actual use is a grave mistake. Look a supermodels; they're 'hot' and have great tits or whatever, but do they do anything? NO.
Argh (Score:2, Insightful)
Not correct (Score:2, Insightful)
This is simply not correct. At work, we have several VCRs for professional use, and the Betacam SP rox in picture quality, sound quality and durability in comparison with SVHS. There is a VERY good reason for the Betas use in professional enviroments since long ago, and the superiority in all-over quality is one of them. If you can't see any difference in picture, you're either colour blind for severely seeing impaired. Or maybe two and a half glances at the screen in a videostore 15 years ago isn't enough.
As for the one hour tapes, this is flat out wrong. Sony did introduce longer running tapes, when the tape technology got better. But in contrary to its competitor, the tapes maintained the Beta quality and seldom broke down as the VHS E120+ tapes have a tendency to do. Especially the E240, don't store any valuable memories on them!
Re:What a load of crap (Score:2, Insightful)
This is absolutely true from a geek/technical perspective, but from a busniess model perspective, it IS superior, ultimately, VHS was the product the consumer decided offered the most value for the money. This is absolutely the case with Wintel PCs today. Most people here on Slashdot would never want Wintel PC, sure, they'll have a "Lintel" (Linux/Intel) or a "LAMD" (Linux/AMD), or perhaps even Mac OS X like myself, and that's because we know that a bug-ridden security-flawed Borg mother ship-contacting OS is coupled with the cheapest metric assload of hi-tech chinese commodity PC parts inside. The consumer doesn't know or care about true technical details, the only process affecting the purchase is that the product has ALL these features, functions, and holy Batman, look at that low LOW price. What a bargain! I get an HP Pavilian with a built-in graphics card, built-in sound card, M$ Windows XP Home Edition, a free printer and monitor for $649 after rebates. The wife and kids will love me, and besides, PC programs are everywhere, on every street corner. You see? Cheap Wintel PCs are not technically superior to Linux PCs or Macs, but from the busniess model perspective, the consumer saw the most value in the Wintel PC, even if it does crash twice a day, that's what everyone is used to experiencing. The consumer, from his or her perspective, isn't missing a thing, and more importantly, it's become part of their way of life, they just press control-alt-delete when the need to, it's what they're used to doing.
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:4, Insightful)
There was an earlier media format that one company came up with, and wanted adopted so badly that they pretty much gave away the licensing for it. It worked. And the 33-1/3 LP caught on quite well.
So using this theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
In 1973, when the Compact Disc was introduced, the "infrastructure of capabilities, services, and support" for analog audio cassettes - prerecorded and otherwise - was vastly superior to that of the audio cassette. The CD prevailed despite the fact that there was no ability to record - analog cassette recorders are now most often encountered as unused legacy devices on multi-function audio hardware.
This "whole product" theory is an unenlightening justification for the emerging popularity of specific standards - it's the best product because it's the one most people buy? While there's truth to this, this fact is often less interesting than examining WHY this is the case.
If the technical standards of Betamax were superior to VHS - and they were - it's more useful to examine why these did not produce the dominant product than it is just to hand-wave the issue by saying that the best product is that which everyone else ended up buying. Any discussion of VHS versus BetaMax that doesn't discuss the fact that Sony wouldn't license its format to adult video studios misses another important aspect of why formats emerge and gain dominance over existing formats - the 'killer ap'.
The fact that he dismisses DAT audio with his "whole product" argument does not strengthen it in the least. The DAT cassette was a product the market was eager and ready for, and the more passive segment of the consumer base would have eventually caught up with the geeks, audiophiles, and techs. The RIAA crippled the format before it reached the consumer by disabling digital-to-digital copying, which given the dominance of the audio cassette DESPITE noted technical deficiencies (fragility, sound quality on normal-bias cassettes, less convenience for liner notes than vinyl), would have been an easy sell to a consumer base used to direct copying. Score one for the RIAA.
Enter MP3s. I've argued that the MP3 format is the just revenge of the marketplace against the deliberate crippling of DAT audio by the RIAA. The MP3 format became popular for technical reasons and became ubiquitous because the "whole product" was exactly what the marketplace had wanted and needed ever since the pre-recorded music industry moved to a read-only CD format - a high fidelity means of audio dubbing free from the limitations and physical fragility of analog cassettes. Had the RIAA had computer audio formats on its radar before it became a consumer reality, have no doubt that it, too, would have been a great idea that never made it to the broader marketplace.
The argument isn't, and never has been that BetaMax was the "better" format or that it was more suitable for the marketplace - the argument is that, based on wholly technical anaysis, it delivered a better performance than VHS. The VHS standard won out because RCA didn't keep their product a proprietary standard subject to its licensing regieme, because of porn as the 'killer ap' among early VHS adopters, because it was a cheaper product to adopt for end-users as well as studios (related to the license issue), and because as more manufacturers developed for what was effectively an open standard, they developed features to get their products noticed which in many cases became standards - multiple recording speeds, for instance. There's no reason why, if the BetaMax standard were open, a savvy competetor in the market could have developed multiple recording speeds. Sony felt it had a say in this matter, RCA didn't.
While the "whole product" isn't a completely invalid method of analyzing competing formats, it is as narrow a look at a larger issue as solely focusing on the technical specs, and is particularly poorly-suited toward determining why a particular format bucks the trend of the status quo and gains market dominance.
If "whole product" were the whole story, we'd probably have never gotten to VHS or BetaMax, and Laser Disc and DVD would have been relegated to a curious historical diversion like the Ford Edsel, 3D cinema, or - more to the point - the DIVX DVD format...
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:2, Insightful)
It will remain a cool and highly useful geek tool.
or it will be killed by the people kludgeing it up to make it a happy-shiney newbie desktop.
Every time I hear someone saying [insert suggestion to cripple Linux down and make it less like Unix] I wince.
Posts Reflect "Better 'Cause I Use Linux" Syndrome (Score:3, Insightful)
A pair of insupportable assertions runs through many posts attacking anyone who suggests that the reason for Linux's limited popular success rests with Linux, not with people who don't use it.
The first assertion: I figured out how to use this thing the hard way, so everyone else should as well.
The second assertion: People don't use Linux because they're either too lazy to figure it out or too stupid. Either way, I'm better than they are because I use Linux.
In truth, there's much about Linux that's a waste of time: multiple installation routines; conflicting packaging "standards"; hazardous library seas; etc. Even for professionals, learning about these things is just annoying. Someone with a commitment to the open source philosophy behind Linux may be accept these annoyances. The rest of the world will just avoid Linux.
A little test (Score:4, Insightful)
Try the following. Grab a computer and install a version of RedHat linux from 1999. Now install the latest version. You'll notice a phenomenal difference between the two products.
The more recent version will have a simple, pretty graphical installer that recognizes just about any hardware and self-configures. It'll have a nice desktop interface that's clearly modeled after Windows/Macintosh. It'll have an office suite designed to be comfortable for someone who's used to MS Office. Almost all of the day-to-day configuration issues (think editing text files) from the 1999 version will have been moved into simple-to-use control panels accessable from the desktop.
Sure, the current version isn't perfect, and it may not be enough to convince most users to switch. But to claim that Linux "expects the customer to change rather than the product" is to set up a strawman that has little to do with reality.
Re:Not correct (Score:1, Insightful)
The Truth: Wrong Patent Strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
As a result, the competitors successfully "invented around" and produced VHS. The VHS-patents were licensed at reasonable rates, and so a lot of companies entered the market with own VCRs, tapes and "infrastructure". Their competition made prices lower, and their combined salesforce did the rest to kick Sony out of the market.
Years later, when Sony's researchers invented the compact disks (for the younger readers: devices used to store music before MP3 was invented), Sony and Philips decided to license the technology to everyone at reasonable prices - and the few cents per disks later added up to billions of dollars.
In fact, "Apple and IBM" was the same story - Apple tried to dominate the world with a proprietary system and failed, while IBM "only" took a few dollars for every PC build...
Re:Not this crap again. - FAST FORWARD better VHS (Score:1, Insightful)
Ask experts : Betamax audio head was TOO FAR APART from video head for efficient tape path!
It was a mini form of UMAT 3/4 inch crap and unsuited for VIDEO CAMERAS and unsuited for user wanting to hit REWIND + STOP + PLAY + FAST FORWARD + STOP +PLAY.
Why? Because the excessive disatnce between the linear audio head (used in prerecorded movies and part of standard) and the distance from the helical scanning head was WAY too far apart comapared to logical and efficient and non-retarded VHS. (Each ff or RW required tape path to be placed back into cassette for high speed motion, and threading took AGES in betamax crap).
Nobody seems to remember this or know this.
I and maybe a handful of other engineers seem to remember how painful it was to fast forward and rewind on ANY betamax deck.
They all sucked.
Them VHS got an exotic M-Format ultra hirez by running tape at 4x speed for pro highend cameras and then the betamax tape had no advantage. VHS at quad speed was unbeatable even if it only held 30 minutes.
Eventually S-VHS came out, allowing 120 minutes at qualities exceeding betamax.
But nobody remembers that Betamax sucked for fast forward and rewind and was unsuited for good hand held cameras all because of its asinine huge distance between audio head and helical head.
I bet, without even reading the article, that the author overlooked the truth and these facts.
read and learn.
Re:Not at all... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:3, Insightful)
Cars are a powerful, universal technology. A huge percentage of the US wants/needs cars. But you can't just go out to the store, buy a car, and drive away with it. You must have a drivers license, a certificate of at least minimum skill in operating the car on a road where other people are also driving and your mistakes can have adverse impacts on others. No skill, no car. Then there are mechanics, who not only can operate the car but know what goes on under the hood. These people are in the strongest position, since they control the technology.
Now think about networked computers. Powerful, universal technology, just like cars, and now essential to the way our society operates. But you don't need a license of minimum competency to purchase a computer and put it on the network. Anyone can, whether or not they know a CDROM from a coaster. The problem is, the analogy holds. People operating computers on the network without minimum ability are a hazard, because their computers can and often do become the tools of people interested in causing trouble. Granted that can happen to people at lots of skill levels, just like accidents happen to good drivers. But the greater the general skill level, the fewer accidents on the highway. Likewise, the more intelligent/educated the community on the network, the stronger the network will be.
Linux nerds are like mechanics - they know the guts and control the technology. But so many people on the net know absolutely nothing about what they are doing, and they represent a danger to the general network community. The solution is education, as usual. Since no basic training for using a computer on a network is mandated, I think the expectation for users to progress to a "power user state" is a reflection of the educated computer users' reactions to what happens when ignorance and technology collide on the net. The infastructure is not robust enough to operate without some active help from its users. Just as cars can't go from a to b safely without a reasonably educated driver. Yes, the car might make it, and the ignorant user might be fine on the net. But the odds against it are much higher, and multiplied by thousands those conditions spell trouble.
A truly terrible article (Score:1, Insightful)
You need to do actual research to write an article sometimes.
Yes, his talk of compatibility makes the whole argument circular, true. But that is the core assertion of this article, so I won't touch it.
The 1 hour limitation was a serious problem. But the real problem with Beta was that Sony wanted higher licensing fees for companies to produce players than JVC did. As a VCR maker, that was pretty simple math to do.
Then he goes on to show how Beta wasn't "technically superior" either, since VHS has the chance to upgrade to the compatible Super-VHS format.
Well, that's true. Except Super-VHS isn't compatible. It's partly compatible. Also, Beta had its own Super- variant. It was called ED Beta and was the highest quality analog consumer video tape format ever. VHS was lucky to get about 225 lines of resolution. S-VHS was a lot better with 350 lines of resolution. However, ED Beta whomped them all with 500 lines of resolution. It generally had better quality than any source available at the time, including LaserDisc which had about 400-450 lines of resolution.
Finally, what about VHS HQ? VHS HQ was a more significant development than S-VHS. I owned an S-VHS deck (pre HQ) and VHS HQ produced almost as large a picture improvement as S-VHS and unlike S-VHS it truly was fully compatible. How successful was VHS HQ? Well, eventually it took over the whole market. All VHS decks have been HQ for over 5 years, they just dropped the name since every one had it anyway.
I'll have to remember his name...what's his name? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a large library of movies recorded onto Beta tapes. Entire movies. The idea that people bought VHS because they could record movies on them is patently ridiculous. He, himself notes that movies were first released on Beta - the format he then claims is too small to hold a movie.
Everyone I knew who bought a VHS rather than a Beta machine, back when VHS was winning the marketing war, did so because you could program the VHS machine to record all your favorite programs for a week or two. At least, someone could, presumably. None of the folks I knew who chose VHS for that feature ever, ever used it. Most could never even figure out how to set the clock.
VHS won that war because of better marketing. They came up with a feature with marginal utility (longer tape length) and convinced a whole lot of people that it was essential.
Home vs. Commercial Use (Score:2, Insightful)
The TV station I work for used to shoot on Beta, and still uses a Betacart playback system for commercials. Sony was very smart to adapt it to a market that would benefit from its picture quality.
Plus, the tape size made it perfect for shooting out in the field - much easier than carting around a camera plus a seperate recording deck.
So, Sony may have failed in the consumer market, but more than made up for it in the professional market.
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the guy basically said that betamax videos were too short, 1 hour, meaning that people couldn't record a movie.
Those would have been the very first tapes, and I doubt more than a very few rich people bought those machines. By the time VHS was declared the winner, there wasn't much difference between the two types - IIRC, six hours for VHS and about five hours for Betamax tapes (and of course the Betamax tapes were smaller).
Most of the rest of the author's claims were a load of bull as well, like his claim that there's no difference in picture quality. I owned both types of machines at the same time because I bought the Betamax before VHS became more popular and I then had to buy the second machine. The picture quality of the Betamax recordings were obviously better than recordings made on the newer VHS machine.
Re:The only convincing bit was... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, as far as I'm concerned. made VHS technically better.
Re:Recording times (Score:5, Insightful)
What really killed Beta was price. The cheapest machines available were always VHS. Sony knew that they had a superior product--they were consistently 6 months ahead of VHS is technical innovation--and they figured they could charge a bit more for their video recorders (and for third party licenses). After all, it was a pricing model that worked just fine for all of Sony's other products. And it made sense if you thought of the primary uses of a VCR as being time-shifting of TV and occasionally playing a purchased tape. What Sony didn't anticipate was that the major use of the VCR would turn out to be playing video rentals.
Carrying two formats was expensive for video stores. And since the cheap VHS players were more popular, they stocked VHS tapes more heavily. Which was another reason, in addition to price, for consumers to buy VHS. Which encouraged rental shops to cut back still further on beta. By the time Sony got wise and cut prices drastically on their low end betas, it was too late for beta to recover.