The Format of TV Choice

You may have missed a small yet significant reason Sony continues to market the Betamax tape format.

About the time Betamax was heading off to obscurity, the Betacam format (which uses the same tape cartridge at a faster speed) was making its way into the broadcast industry. It soon became the worldwide standard for electronic news gathering and remains so today.

As long as Sony is churning out tape stock for thousands of Betacams around the globe, keeping the cassettes available to home Betamax users probably isn’t as big a deal as it might seem.

DAVE KUNZ

Cameraman

KABC-TV News

Los Angeles