Linux for ps3

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by partridge

Betamax was the BETTER technology and is still used by professionals in tv. What lost that fight for Sony was that they didn't get to the consumer rental market as quickly as VHS did.

Remember when video shops had betamax and vhs? But eventually betamax vanished because the movie studios all went with vhs, because they were the bigger selling player (and were bigger in size too)

I have a good friend who was the president of one of the largest video distributors to rental shops back in the early 80s. (It was actually his team which worked out how they could track all rentals in near real time through the stores terminals. This completely changed the financial dynamics for the large distributors giving them the impetus to put a lot of money [and thus a lot of tapes] into the rental market.)

In the mid 90s we sat down and talked about why Beta won out over VHS. While he said there were many, many factors, from his perspective the biggest hindrance was the duration of the Beta tapes.

He felt Sony gambled and lost. Movies seemed to be getting shorter in the 70s. Supposedly gone were the days of the 2 hour movie. Movies were being shown on TV in a two hour block with many minutes of commercials thus requiring significant editing. Movies were getting more expensive to make. Thus it appeared that by the early 80s very few movies would be much over 90 minutes long.

So, as he understood it, Sony decided to go with a high quality format and a limit of 90 minutes per tape.

By the early 80s it became apparent that the 90 minute format would not work. People wanted to tape 2 hour shows on TV. Also movies were still routinely longer than 90 minutes.

With VHS having a standard mode of 2 hours virtually all movies could be shown at VHS's best quality and virtually any TV show could be recorded at VHS's best quality.

True, Beta's standard quality was noticeably better than VHS's standard quality, but the 90 minute format killed them for practical use.

True, Beta came out with a 3 hour mode (and later a 5 hour mode), but the 3 hour mode was no better (in the average viewers eyes) than the VHS 2 hour mode -- and how many shows were more than 2 hours but less than 3. And Beta had lost the edge with the population by the time the 3 hour format came out.

True, Beta came out with extended length tapes to get about 2 hours at the highest quality, but, again, by that time VHS already had the market virtually locked up.

This was just the opinion of someone who I thought should have been "in the know" on things like this.

Sony appears to be taking the exact opposite tack this time...
1) Sony has attempted to put together the larger of the two consortia: Blu-ray.
2) Blu-ray has chosen a format which holds more information.
3) Blu-ray has done almost whatever is needed to get as many studios on board as possible.

This will not be the same battle as 25+ years ago. Will Blu-ray win out? Absolutely no one knows. However, Sony has taken care not to make the same mistakes as last time. It may be making new ones (such as shipping single layer for the first few months and using MPEG-2 rather than AVC [H.264] for the first few movies, etc.), but it is not making the same mistakes twice.