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Sony did a clever thing back in the early days of Betamax. They used the format itself to directly promote Beta's superiority through special demonstration tapes. Some were made to be played in the showrooms and stores across America but most were included along with the newly purchased Beta VCR. The subjects of these cassettes were the features and benefits of owning a Beta VCR. They also promoted the new technological advancements of Beta, some even promoted other Sony products. Because Sony was the primary provider of Beta machines this gave them a great advantage. Sure, Beta was licensed and made by other manufacturers (Sanyo, Toshiba, Aiwa and NEC) and they did their own advertising, but it was Sony that was the strongest Beta promoter. They had the most to gain if their format managed to dominated the consumer video market (and a lot to lose if it didn't). It would be another success to add to the transistor radio, Triniton television, recording tape, walkman and their professional broadcast products. They knew their format was better because they had already developed and discarded the "M" loading system (later to become VHS) some time back because they discovered it was too hard on the tape, was clunky to operate and was not at all user friendly. They even gave up their rights to it, something that would come back later to bite them. That inferior "M" loading system was soon snapped up by a small obscure company (compared to Sony) named Matsushita. Before VHS they had primarily had been a producer of products made for other companies. It was the liberal licensing policy for VHS that did Beta in and helped expand it's market share. VHS never made demonstration tapes. (Matsushita would eventually promote their own logos, Panasonic and JVC, after VHS began to become accepted.) There were so many VHS manufactures and such fierce pricing competition that a direct video tape campaign would have been unpractical. But in the beginning Sony owned a 75% share of the growing home video market and they closely controlled the specifications for the Beta format. The market growth situation was good for Sony and these promotional tape helped capitalize on it and It was a great idea too, as long as the public watched and responded favorably. For maybe ten minutes they had a captive audience that was really interested in what was being presented. Try doing that with a television commercial! Here are those interesting and unique tapes that went into battle back when the video recorder was new. As you will see Sony did not produce a SuperBeta (only) demo cassette because this picture improvement came after the introduction of Betahi-fi stereo, so the SuperBeta picture was promoted along with Betafi-fi stereo using a single SuperBetafi-fi demo tape. Did any of the other Beta manufacturers produce a demonstration tape? To find out click here. ©Misterßetamax go to homepage |