Reflections on Dead Home-Entertainment Technology

By Steve Evans

On this day in 1975 Sony introduced the Betamax 9300, a "video recorder" almost the size of a footlocker and priced at $2,295 (about $11,000 in 2018 dollars). It had fat piano keys for controls and a crude LCD numeric screen. Made a fair amount of whirring noise, too. With the release of this brute of a component, Sony began the era of the home theater concept and forever changed the way people consume programming, since they were no longer at the mercy of broadcasters' schedules. That is, if you could figure out how to program the machine and set the timer to record the correct channel.

In less than a decade Betamax would be extinct after losing the videotape format war to VHS cassettes, which delivered noticeably lower image quality but were cheaper. We had a top-loading Betamax that ended up in basement storage when VHS took over and it was no longer possible to buy the smaller Betamax cassettes. I remember the owner of a local video rental store saying how happy he was when Betamax died because he no longer had to buy two copies of the same movie on different videotape formats. Blockbuster arrived a couple years later and he went out of business, anyway.

My first movie from that rental store was Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) on a Betamax cassette. I had never seen the film, much less uncut, as there is no way any network back then would have shown that legendarily violent film as released theatrically. As a fledgling 14-year-old film buff, being able to rent and watch a movie on demand was a revelation (nor did the rental shop owner give a damn about whether I was old enough to be watching R-rated movies). Soon, most of my allowance money was going to movie rentals at the video store down the street. All of them were beat up and scratchy, even the new releases after only a couple of weeks, but I didn't care. In a town with only two single-screen movie theaters and cable TV service still a few years off, having a video rental store was like a passport to exotic lands of adventure.  

I'd bet that mom still has that Betamax monster socked away somewhere in her basement -- and it probably still works -- only there's no way to hook up the equipment to a modern TV because RCA jacks, and the red, yellow and white cables to connect them, are likewise a thing of the past.

Nothing lasts forever, except my ridiculous habit of renting and then buying films like The Wild Bunch on video cassette (twice), DVD and, more recently, on Blu-ray. If Peckinpah's bloody classic is ever released in the 4K format, I’ll buy that one, too. Obsessions always start somewhere. I have Betamax to thank for mine.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.