It's Official! DVD Kills Beta (1 Viewer)

[Peter Overduin]

In a way, this is humorous. The Beta format is being terminated, and DVD is partly to blame according to this article. For my part, I haven't seen this 'format' in Canada for years. Does anyone even still pursue this? Almost seems like sticking with 8-track.
http://www.tvinsite.com/twice/index....y=breakingNews

 

[SteveK]

You're right Peter...it certainly is humorous. To cite DVD as a factor in the death of Beta is like citing airline travel as a factor in the lack of demand for stagecoaches, or blaming e-mail for the death of the Pony Express. Funny, they don't even mention VHS, which obviously was the real reason for the death of Beta. And their own ineffective marketing of what (I've heard) was a superior product certainly couldn't have anything to do with it, could it?

DVD kills Beta. Yeah right!

Steve K.

 

[jacob w k]

Beta just died recently? I think that press release is 10 years late.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

You could buy Beta tapes at Circuit City until 2 years ago

I'm amazed they still made consumer decks. However pro Beta will be around for a LONG time to come

 

[Michael St. Clair]

Betacam doesn't really have anything to do with Betamax.

 

[Frank PW]

I could be wrong, but isn't Beta huge in Japan? My neighbor’s mother has a sizable collection of Beta material.

When her player died she took it to the Sony store for repair. In the end she ended up getting a new one special order from Sony. The salesman mentioned to her that the Beta format had the upper hand over there.

Anyone have insight in to this? Any recent visitors to the country?

 

[Ben Tallen]

Truly, the only surprising thing about this press release is that beta was even still in existence. I thought beta production stopped in the mid eighties!

 

[Artur Meinild]

Sony did bring Betamax format to market first, but it lost out to Matsushita?s rival VHS system

...because this is what it says further down!
Still funny though.
BTW, nice sig Michael, but the link needs to be truncated to work.

 

[SteveK]

Arthur- I should have been more clear in my post. The article does indeed mention VHS, but I don't get the impression that VHS was mentioned by Sony, at least not as specifically as DVD was. Let's face it, VHS had a lot more to do with the "death" of Beta than DVD did. DVD may help to kill VHS, but I doubt that it had much impact on killing Beta.

Steve K.

 

[gregstaten]

Jeff:

Actually Betacam SP is dying out faster than you think - at least as an acquisition format. In the corporate space DV, DVCAM and DVCPro are taking over. In the broadcast space you can add DigiBeta and BetaSX to the above list. In the professional market DigiBeta and DVCAM are pretty much it.

I still have a Beta deck in my suite, but use it primarily to output SP dubs for client viewing. But with Sony's new J-series decks, it is so cheap to get a DBeta screening deck, that I may not even do that for more than a couple of years.

(Now if we could just get those 3/4 Umatic decks at the agencies to die!)

-greg

 

[Wes]

I retired my Super Beta the day I got a DVD player back in 97, I did not have enough room for both in my rack! Never looked back!!

Wes

 

[Tony Whalen]

ROFL. Geez Wes...I thought I was the only one. I've still got my nice Sony SuperBeta machine...but it got stored away after I discovered the joy that is DVD.
Gotta say that DVD 'causing' the death of Betamax is pretty amusing...

 

[Jeff_HR]

I still use my Betamax as I have an extensive library of off-the-air recordings of material that is not replaceable. Sony shot themselves in the foot with the Betamax format via their bad marketing & inability to match JVC point for point on features. Sony got behind & never caught up. The Circuit City stores here in Toledo still sell Beta tapes, although they are most likely all that is left from their inventory.

 

[DeathStar1]

Re: Sticking with 8 tracks...
Don't diss the 8 Tracks man . Even though I'm more a kid of the 80's, than the 70's, being born in '78, I still remember them fondly.
We used to, and I beleive still do somewhere, have an 8Track recorder with a little microphone that we had to speek into. The tape itself is dated 1983, and still works pretty decently today . One of these days, I'm going to have to record it to CD...

 

[Patrick McCart]

Does this mean Digital Betamax will be discontinued?

The quality of DB is great (used for the Scifi Channel episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000...

 

[gregstaten]

Patrick - you mean Digital Betacam? It isn't going anywhere. In fact, it is probably the most popular mastering format in post-production today.

-greg

 

[Neil S. Bulk]

I thought this was going to link to an "Onion" like article. I didn't expect it to be the real deal. Funny stuff!

Neil

 

[JJR512]

There was a quote above referring to "Matsushita's rival VHS system". I was under the impression that VHS was developed by JVC. I'm pretty sure JVC isn't a Matsushita company (I know Panasonic, Technics, and Quasar are). Was VHS co-developed by JVC and Matsushita, or was the article wrong?