"The Great Time Machine" came out the next year and Beta's hope to be the dominate format in home video recording was soon to be vanquished. It really couldn't have ended up any other of way when you consider that ultimately all the public really cared about was the most recording time for the least money and what format their neighbors had. The things Sony was pushing, tape handling characteristics, picture quality and great special features didn't matter a flip to most consumers. Sony was mystified, everything they stood for didn't cut it this time. They were the symbol of excellence and now they had something superior and no matter what they did to try and save it, it was failing. They were very innovative, true to form for Sony, but VHS sales continued to rise and the Beta's market share dwindled to nothing. In retrospect Sony made lots of errors, from not being able to meet the demand for their video tapes early on, licensing problems, the fiasco (the only machine), insisting on using mini phone jacks for audio when the rest of the world used phono plugs, the confusing tape length numbering; the list goes on. It really stands as a testimonial to Sony's strength that they maintained their dignity and market image through all of it. A lesser company could have come out of it all as a broken down joke, but Sony didn't. I only wished they had continued on, recognizing that VHS was for the masses, and not treated Beta in the later years like the crazy aunt locked up in the basement.

I made the decision early on that Beta was better. Picture quality was paramount to me. I was mystified when I saw people looking at videos played back on VHS machines that looked like they were recorded through a screen door or in a fish tank. (Remember this was early in the game and things improved greatly since those days.) Oh yes, I had (have) a VHS machine so I could make dubs for my friends and many times I fought the urge to throw it in the trash. It was especially irritating trying to find a location on a tape and having to wait for the tape to wind in and wind out. Betas low friction tape path allowed for its tape to stay in the machine during rewind and fast forward, making it a snap to find a particular section. (Don't rewind your tapes in your machine, save wear and tear, buy a winder).

So how does all this misery lead back to the structure of video tape. Well read on, you've went this far. When Sony engineers looked at the various formats back in 1975 (Sanyo V-Cord, Quazar, Cartrivison, VHS and others) they felt they could do better. Those designs were too complicated, distorted the tape while playing, not suitable to the vision of the Sony brass and, more importantly, not invented by Sony. At this time they were manufacturing their own video tape and they knew that forcing it to deform around the video drum would cause wear and tear on both the tape and the machine. Their "U" type loading system used in the U-matic guided the tape around, down, back around and up so it could wrap around the video drum to maintain alignment rather than distorting it as VHS did. So they modified it to become Beta and now the tape would be handled oh so well from that small little shell. What they didn't foresee was that tape would get better, a lot better. Their Crystal ball and their position as a tape manufacturer made them focus on tape handling, longevity and quality. They didn't consider the masses and the pricing that much. As other media manufacturers got into the game of making video tape it continued to improve. It became more durable and the back coated it with graphite so it would be more slippery. Now it could almost slide through a VHS machine like Beta. (The downside to this is it also became a lot more messy.) The distortion and damage from wear issue became less and less of an issue. Sure the Beta format was technically superior, sure it handled the tape better and allowed for all kinds of neat little benefits like BetaSkipscan, indexing or not having to wind the tape out of the tape path for rewinding. But the buying public didn't care, Sony couldn't make them interested and they failed to cater to the faithful out there that did care. So down the spiral went all because of the initial focus on how to best handle the tape inside the machine. A lot is left out of the story. But it couldn't have turned out much differently. The Video recording phenomena was just too big and too fast for even Sony to control. I'm just glad they were in it, they produced some of the best examples of consumer video products to ever hit the world market because of it.