End of an era: Sony to stop making Betamax tapes

As it turns out, Sony has continued to make and sell Betamax tapes.

Yes, you might only know of Betamax from the VHS vs Betamax battle of video format wars of the 70s and 80s. Beta tapes were smaller, but in the home video market, VHS won out.

In 1988, Sony conceded victory to the rival format producing its first VHS video cassette recorder.

Now Sony has decided that this market is just announced it’ll stop selling them from March of next year.

Betamax is best known for its contribution to the “videotape format war” of the 1970s and 1980s.

The BBC still has Betamax tapes in a few of its archives but most broadcasters had stopped recording on them by the year 2000.

Beta video cassette, recording media for magnetic tape recording system for home video recording applications, developed Betamax format, has been engaged in production in 1975. It was more than a decade before Sony licensed the Betamax technology to other companies, and the nail in the coffin came shortly after, when Sony capped the maximum record time per tape to one hour, a third of what VHS was capable of.

Even though it hasn’t really been producing Betamax or MicroMV items since at least 2002, Sony has finally and officially killed off the two brands.

The 2000s saw their own format war with HD DVD and Blu-ray squaring off and HD DVD dying an early death despite avid supporters of the tech.