Betamax is Sony’s home video cassette system. It’s touted as the true beginning of home video—an easy-touse video cassette recorder/player that employs inexpensive video cassettes. Betamax went on sale this September in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, at least two years ahead of any competition from RCA, MCA/Phillips, and Zenith’s video records, and Sony appears committed to a gradual development in sales that could see Betamax expand as a consumer product the way audio cassettes did after their introduction in the mid-sixties.

Betamax is an electric toy predicated on the assumption that people will pay $2,295 (plus tax) to use their TV like they use their record player, Until now, TVs'were like radios—you might turn the box on or off and change channels, but you couldn’t alter ^ particular programs broadcast at that moment. Betamax lets you show what you want when you want on your TV screen in the same way the record player let us hear what we want when we want to hear it.

Betamax is a video cassette machine. It records programs off the television on a magnetic tape cassette and plays them back again whenever you want to see them. The cassette recorder/player works exactly as an audio cassette player: you pop in a blank cassette, push the record button, aqd whatever is on your TV screen (sound and picture in full color) is recorded on the cassette.

Unfortunately, Sony has not seen fit to sell the Betamax cassette machine alone. The $2,295 price tag includes a 19” Sony Trinitron TV, two sets of tuners, a timer, and the cassette machine, all in a stunningly ugly wooden console. The system makes it possible to watch a golf game on CBS while taping a tennis match op NBC. You can watch one channel and record another since two sets of VHF-UHF tuners are included, one connected to the TV set, the other connected to the video cassette recorder. This is a wonderful convenience, but hardly worth the sales lost from people who want a video cassette machine but are quite happy with their present TV sets; or those of us who watch TV on video projectors. So, initially at least, Sony has turned a $800 video machine into a $2,295 potential disaster. I remember the results of Cartrivision linking their cassette unit with the sale of a color TV. While I dcjn’t think Sony will follow Cartrivision into bankruptcy, I am surprised at Sony’s continuing inability to understand the American consumer. They have jeopardied the success of a venture by ah unnecessarily high price tag and limited their market to individuals willing to buy another TV set as the price for buying a video cassette machine.

Betamax, as a system, is wonderful. The wonder lies in the size and price of the video cassette. Sony and other Japanese manufacturers already have a fairly successful video cassette system on the educational/industrial/rich .people market. It’s called the U-Matic system, works very very well, and you can buy one (without having to buy a TV) in most major to medium sized cities—just look in the Yellbw Pages under closed-circuit TV equipment — for ' $1,500 or so . But the cassette used by the U-Matic machines is monstrous. A U-Matic cassette is exactly the size (and just about the weight) of Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate dictionary. It costs about $30 for^i one hour cassette. The Betamax cassette is about an eighth the size of U-Matic. It’s the size of a drug store rack paperback book (Creem’s Rocki Revolution, for instance) and lists for $15.95, meaning it sells for $10 to $11 per hour cassette.

I played with the Betamax recently at Rabson’s, one of the New York dealers demonstrating thp system. It worked well, but what sold me. was the size of the cassette. It feels the right size for its task. It’sjike the audio cassette, when you hold it in your hand you can tell that it’s a realistic amount of space to be taken up by an hour of sounds. The Betamax cassette is so small and compact it feels great if you can connect that it holds one hour of color television, sound and picture: As a medium for the dissemination of, audib/video materials the Betamax cassette has great promise—Sony has already developed automated procedures for producing the cassette and the player, so when they do latch on to a market here, the cost of the equipment will decrease as sales increase.

TURN TO PAGE 96.

REWIRE YOURSELF

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 48.

Besides the. high initial cost for the Betamax machine, the system has other potential faults. First, the quality of the picture could he improved, although it is satisfactory at this stage in its development. Second, the maximum record time of the cassette—so movies will require more than one cassette. Third, the all or nothing selling approach Sony has chosen. Fourth, there is yet to be a companion TV camera or portable recording system using the Betamax cassette format. Sony says they plan to market a black and white TV camera for the Betamax so you can make your own TV with the systepi as well as taping off the air.

Sony’s approach to selling Betamax shows they’ve learned from their consumer audio and educational/industrial video products that there are several money markets in one area. Sony sells $9.95 radios and $1,600 stereo amplifiers; $395 TVs and $3,000 video projectors. I suspect that, initially, Sony wants to sell Betamax to the home audiophile—an older person with money who enjoys buying the latest in state of the art electric toys’. This is an established market to which Sony is already selling their $500 and up hi-fi equipment. Turning the audiophile into a videophile,shouldn’t be difficult, especially with Sony’s polished ad pitches. (The initial distribution of Betamax tp selected hi-fi stores, is the first indication of Sony’s marketing plans.)

Betamax has been designed as a record-your-own-TV-shows consumer item—Sony isn’t making a major commitment tb supply special prerecorded programs for Betamax owners. They say they will have some pre-recorded cassettes, but the company is in the hardware business and any pre-recorded programs will just be available as icing to attract customers. If the system is successful pre-recorded programs will be available from other sources, but right now it all depends on how much of a market Sony can create for Betamax.

If you’ve been interested in a video system for home use, Betamax is the answer, at least until the video records come along. Despite its system limitations and the conservative marketing approach, Sony has created a home video cassette player/recorder that is easy to manipulate and inexpensive to use. Now all they have to do is sell the cassette machine without all the extras so it will be available at a realistic price •for what you’re getting. W