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Home Video (part 1):
"I'm going home to watch The Late Show"
Back in 1975, the line of people at Macy's Herald Square store stretched out the door onto 34th Street to see firsthand the first home Video Cassette Recorder, a combination TV and video recorder. It was made by Sony and called Betamax.
The price tag on the LV-1901 Betamax/TV Combo, an offspring of the highly successful Umatic professional VCR that Sony developed in the early ‘70s, was a "mere" $2,495 (roughly $10,000 in 2005 dollars). A year later, I personally remember seeing the Betamax Recorder, without the TV, at Willoughby's Camera Store in Manhattan. I dreamed of owning the first stand-alone version of the Betamax, which was called the SL-7200, but at $1,300 plus $40 for the optional timer, it was just a bit too pricey for this young salesman, who was making $11,000 a year at that time!
Thus 1975–1976 marked the dawn of home video recording, and the Sony Betamax was the "rising sun." But Betamax would soon become a "falling star," and today there are probably more Betamax VCRs in the Smithsonian than in US homes. Why did the technologically superior Betamax, made by Sony—a pioneering company with vast resources and technological expertise—become the dinosaur of home video?
A variety of issues explain why Betamax failed to capture anything but a sliver of the home video market, but here is their first flub which set the stage for a series of events that relegated the Betamax to the domain of Edsels, crossbows and Nehru jackets.
In 1975–76, the very first TV ad campaign for the Sony Betamax featured a NYC cab driver, who stated, "I just finished working the night shift [it was early morning] and I'm going home to watch The Late Show," indicating that he had recorded a movie while he was driving his cab at night. This was not David Letterman, but a late-night movie slot on CBS in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, which had the “Syncopated Clock” as its opening theme song. The problem was that the movie was two hours long, and the SL-7200 recorded only one hour with an L-500 video cassette!
Back in 1975, the line of people at Macy's Herald Square store stretched out the door onto 34th Street to see firsthand the first home Video Cassette Recorder, a combination TV and video recorder. It was made by Sony and called Betamax.
The price tag on the LV-1901 Betamax/TV Combo, an offspring of the highly successful Umatic professional VCR that Sony developed in the early ‘70s, was a "mere" $2,495 (roughly $10,000 in 2005 dollars). A year later, I personally remember seeing the Betamax Recorder, without the TV, at Willoughby's Camera Store in Manhattan. I dreamed of owning the first stand-alone version of the Betamax, which was called the SL-7200, but at $1,300 plus $40 for the optional timer, it was just a bit too pricey for this young salesman, who was making $11,000 a year at that time!
Thus 1975–1976 marked the dawn of home video recording, and the Sony Betamax was the "rising sun." But Betamax would soon become a "falling star," and today there are probably more Betamax VCRs in the Smithsonian than in US homes. Why did the technologically superior Betamax, made by Sony—a pioneering company with vast resources and technological expertise—become the dinosaur of home video?
A variety of issues explain why Betamax failed to capture anything but a sliver of the home video market, but here is their first flub which set the stage for a series of events that relegated the Betamax to the domain of Edsels, crossbows and Nehru jackets.
In 1975–76, the very first TV ad campaign for the Sony Betamax featured a NYC cab driver, who stated, "I just finished working the night shift [it was early morning] and I'm going home to watch The Late Show," indicating that he had recorded a movie while he was driving his cab at night. This was not David Letterman, but a late-night movie slot on CBS in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, which had the “Syncopated Clock” as its opening theme song. The problem was that the movie was two hours long, and the SL-7200 recorded only one hour with an L-500 video cassette!
Thus was Sony Betamax’s dubious introduction into the home VCR market and, as they say, it was all downhill from there.
Soon afterwards, JVC announced its version of the home VCR, which was called the Vidstar HR-3300. JVC named the format VHS, which was an abbreviation for “Vertical Helix Scan,” but the initials quickly morphed into "Video Home System," and that is the term still used today.
The VHS format by JVC was introduced as a 2-hour deck, which used a T-120 video cassette (T-120 means Time 120 minutes; the Betamax term L-500 means length 500'). Remember our cab driver? Well, with the JVC Vidstar 2-hour VCR, he could now record all 120 minutes of The Late Show and within about a year, when the VHS went to 4-hours, record The Late, Late Show as well.
