[Nasional-e] Bye-bye, Betamax

[Ambon]

Sept.8, 2002

Bye-bye, Betamax

A t the tail end of August, a brief obituary ran in business pages around
the world: The Betamax VCR format was dead. Sony had just announced that it
would stop manufacturing its Betamax video-recording machines by year's end
and concentrate instead on DVD and other new technologies.
The big surprise here was not the disclosure that Betamax was about to
breathe its last; it was the revelation that the quintessentially '70s and
'80s technology was still alive. Who would have thought it? Didn't it lose
the war way back in 1988, when Sony, in a tacit admission that Beta's rival
format had cornered the market, first started making VHS recorders? In some
ways, the company's latest statement is on a par with the zany announcement
by the South Australian state government on Aug. 16 that World War II was
officially over. People, we'd heard that already.
But there's always more to a story than you think. In the South Australian
case, the official declaration was required to overturn a wartime emergency
powers act that gave the state government sweeping, and by now illegal,
authority to search, arrest, impose rationing and so on. In the excitement
of 1945, apparently, they forgot to revoke it.
In Sony's case, similarly, it turns out that the company had never actually
stopped manufacturing Betamax VCRs; most of us just thought it had. Sony did
halt overseas production of the fast-fading technology in 1998, but
evidently continued to produce a small number for the domestic market right
through the stagnant '90s and into the new millennium. Make that a very
small number: just 2,800 units last year. That does not get you sidewalk
space in Akihabara.
Nevertheless, Betamax technology kept its devotees to the bitter end.
Home-recording aficionados are doubtless penning requiems to Beta right now,
along with hymns to its inherent and undying superiority to VHS. Even those
of us whose televisions were, and are, so no-frills that the supposed
difference between the two was never remotely detectable will recall the
Betamax years with nostalgia.
The fact is, Betamax was first -- in everything. It was the first home
video-cassette recorder on the market, all those eons ago in 1975. And it
was the first with every subsequent improvement to the format after that,
except, perhaps crucially, for recording length. In a curious way, that
makes it first in our hearts, as well, even though we all long ago switched
to VHS, then Super-VHS, then 8-mm video, then laserdisc, then DVD, in the
never-ending search for the best possible small-screen version of "Roman
Holiday."
Betamax is us when we were younger. Remember those days (we find ourselves
thinking now) when the word was virtually synonymous with VCR, that magical
new toy? Remember when you would walk into a video store and most of the
stock was in Beta format? Remember those few pivotal years in the late '70s
and early '80s when people really had to wrestle with the choice: Betamax or
VHS? And what about all those old Beta tapes of our children's piano
recitals and baseball games? The kids are grown and gone now, and the tapes
are gathering dust in dim closets. With Sony's surprise announcement last
month, baby boomers everywhere registered a twinge of grief: not for an
outdated scrap of technology, but for themselves.
But there was surely a twinge of admiration in there, too. Betamax, it
turned out, was a survivor in the grand Japanese tradition once
characterized by scholar Ivan Morris as the nobility of failure. For
whatever reason -- poor marketing, stubbornness, just plain bad luck-Beta's
share of the VCR market had shrunk to less than 1 percent by 1989. Yet,
contrary to expectations, it didn't skulk away. Twenty-seven years after its
dazzling debut, it is still a cult object for technophiles, helped rather
than hindered, probably, by its very scarcity.
It is ironic that it should finally be bowing out just as its arch rival,
Victor Japan's VHS-format recorder, seems headed for obscurity as well,
albeit after years in the full sun of total market dominance. Reportedly,
Victor lost money in two out of the last three fiscal years and is also
anticipating losses for the year that ended March 31. We're in the DVD era
now, for at least the marketplace.
Or perhaps the timing of the demise is not ironic, but deliberate -- a
message from Sony that Betamax was a product it was proud of, despite the
product's utterly ignominious performance. That's special.
The Japan Times: Sept. 8, 2002
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