I also remember my Dad bringing home our first VCR. A betamax. Walking down to the video store and having a much smaller choice of tapes to choose from. I remember watching The Golden Child and Coming to America on it one afternoon. Good times.

I’m fascinated by the design in a lot of these ads, with their Bold, roman headlines and white backgrounds and accompanying shots of the product. So many of them sucked but you did at least know what you were buying.

More recently Sony also prohibited daughter companies duplicating porn Blu-Ray discs (which isn’t unique, other companies like Philips feel the same). No problem, the porn industry simply goes to a different company who has no qualms about working with the porn industry.

Sony lost the video format war because VHS was cheaper to license, had longer tape lengths, was based on simpler tech and therefore cheaper and there were a lot more companies producing VHS VCRs. Competition leads to lower prices leads to more products sold. Sony simply couldn’t compete with its own expensive proprietary standard against one that was used by all other companies.

They had this pure ideal of the product and weouldn’t tolerate the knocking of boots on the Beta.

And as for the MINI Disc player, yes I can sdee how it was superseded for playing music, but it is still faultless for recording. And the discs cost buttons, and are reusable.

Thanks for the blast from the past!

The main reason why Neo-Geo wasn’t successful was the price of the console and the absolutely ridiculous prices of the game cartridges. This is because the home Neo-Geo console was identical to the arcade Neo-Geo cabinets and the games were also perfect arcade quality (with some home console specific changes). Back in the day full arcade quality games at home was simply unheard of (unlike now), but this made the games too expensive.

If you take a one year old cellphone into an AT&T or Sprint store and they practically call everyone over to look at the antique. I mean, come on.

And I was one that got burned by the whole HD-DVD/BluRay debacle. Not by a lot, but that format went down in flames faster than I could have ever believed. Leaving everyone who bought into it holding the bag.

Beta was so commonplace that we still keep a Beta deck maintained and plugged in to the edit suite, because if we receive footage from another production company, there is a reasonable chance that it will come on a Beta tape (though that’s becoming less common). There is also a very slight chance that we will have to produce a Beta tape for someone else, although it’s been almost 10 months since I had to do that.

But it’s all a moot point now; DVCPro and DV Cam world won’t get the run that Beta had. It’s all moving towards hard drive capture. We are even talking about getting a student in to transfer our old tapes to a digital format. The only remaining hurdle is for the price of storage to decrease just a little bit more; which my company is hoping will happen before we need to run out and buy another couple terabytes.