Assumed already dead by many, the final Betamax cassette will roll off the production line in March 2016 as its maker concedes defeat to the march of time, 20, maybe 30, years late.
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You may have thought that Betamax was long gone after losing the videotape format war against JVC’s VHS in the 1980s, but Betamax has actually lived on in Sony‘s homeland of Japan.
Sony will terminate the beta video cassette and micro MV cassettes shipped * with the 3/2016.
I bet you didn’t know that Betamax was still on sale, did you?
So despite pulling Betamax machines from the market in 2002 Sony could still flog Betamax tapes to these guys and find a ready market.
The news will likely come as a surprise to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the defining format war of the 1980s. Sony first launched its Betamax products in 1975 as a household, magnetic video format for consumers to record analogue television shows.
The last Betamax products you can buy are a couple of tapes, since the last recorders were discontinued in 2002. Well, brace yourself, because Sony has just announced it’s going to stop producing tapes for the failed format in March 2016.
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Sony would have its day though, as when the second format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray broke out in 2005, Sony’s Blu-ray was triumphant, helped by being included in the PlayStation 3 games console, which at launch was one of the cheapest Blu-ray players on the market.
