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Good point - I'd forgotten that.

The VHS-Beta-V2000 battle was extremely expensive for all the companies concerned, and I think they were hoping that they could recoup their development costs and initial losses in licensing fees. As things turned out, there wasn't that much between VHS and Beta to begin were choosing VHS. The battle raged for several years, with Sony sub-licensing Beta to Toshiba and Sanyo, whilst JVC licensed VHS to Matsupooa (Panasonic-tehnics), Mitsubishi, Thorn-EMI, GEC-Hitachi and many other minor players.

As it turned out, sub-licensing to Matsupooa proved to be an inspirational move, with Panasonic producing probably the best quality machines at very compebreastive prices. The person product for VHS was the camcorder, however. It was physically impossible to produce a Beta tape-threading mechanism small enough to fit into a 2-brick sized camera, whereas a VHS loading mechanism, including tape, would *just* fit in that space, leaving just enough room for a battery, vidicon tube, viewfinder (optical) with video & control electronics. The beta problem was the distance between the audio and video heads, and the angle-length of the scanned lines on the tape. End of story for Beta. No camcorder.

For those who aren't familiar, unlike audio recordings, video is scanned onto tape in much the same way as traditional CRTs scan the phosphor screen. This uses a rotating head-drum, with two or four magnetic 'heads' set at 180 or 90 degrees to read or write the tracks. You don't need four heads, but if you have only two, you get noise-bars in half-speed slow-motion.

The final master-stroke for VHS, and the rest-knell for Beta and V2000 was the VHS-C format. This exploits the simple tape loading mechanism of VHS, with a cut-down cbuttette using the *same* width tape, looping around a reduced diameter record-playback head disc. Pull the tape a little further around the head, and the same length of scan is achieved with a much smaller diameter head disc. A cleverly designed mini-cbuttette holder loads the baby-tape into a full-sized cradle, and because the format is identical, the VHS-C tape can be played directly on a full-sized VHS machine. No way back for Beta.

The end of the story is an interesting one, as it brings in a new world of cooperation between consumer electronics manufacturers which remained the norm for a couple of decades, until DVD. From the Beta camp, Sanyo and Toshiba licensed VHS, and produced both types of machine for some time and were latterly, and perhaps slightly reluctantly, followed by Sony. Sony also continued to support beta, producing both VHS and Beta machines. I do not believe that they *ever* said that they would pull away from Beta, but in the end, they did. Philips abandoned V2000, but not before producing one more machine. I believe it was the V2002 (cf N1700 and N1702), which fixed a large number of the many mechanical design flaws of the V2000 system, but its extreme complexity, and the well-established nature of the VHS and Beta worlds meant that it never got close to mbutt-market adoption. This was a major failure for Philips, who'd been the *only* supplier of AV-Domestic video recorders for many years, and had also had major success with audio cbuttette.

The second bit of interesting fall-out is that the two 'losers' of the video wars went on to cooperate very closely indeed on laser-disk technology. Philips already had a 12" laser disc, capable of storing a complete film in broadcast-quality PAL (way ahead of anything which could be done on tape, even today). Their optics were combined with a digital coding system Sony had come up with to create the Compact Disc (the Philips influence is again clear - compact cbuttette and compact disc). So, whilst they'd lost the video-tape battle, they created a new market in audio-disc, following on from the walkman market (a Sony development of another Philips invention). Some further work resulted in Mpeg2 video recording onto the CD sized disc, whichfinallygave Philips and Sony a leading role in Video playback, so many years after losing to JVC-Matsupooa. Again, however, in the spirit of cooperation which had resulted from the video wars, they agreed with the Film Studios that the world would be split into regions, with Europe being VHS-Pal, North America being VHS-NTSC and Asia-Pac being CD-MPEG2. This ensured that the differential pricing and release schedules the film companies rely on could be maintained. It also meant that the video-cd is relatively rare outside of Asia. I've got loads of them, though :-).

Then the late 1990s came, with DVD-recordable around the corner. A rush of blood to the head of various executives, and we have, once again, a format war, which is costing the manufacturers dear...

-- end Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk The horror... the horror!