Sony engineers invented Betamax, only to see the cheaper VHS become the standard for videocassette recorders.
Police also seized a sizable quantity of VHS and Betamax video tapes, 8mm tapes and discs.
As TRON: Legacy showed in an early scene, the arcade has gone the way of the Betamax.
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Betamax was launched in 1975, and won many fans who said it was better quality than its VHS rival.
The professional Betamax format, Betacam, is still widely used in the television and film industries and will be unaffected.
Just as AC beat DC, the audio cassette beat 8-track and VHS beat Betamax, Qwerty won the format war.
But the recent rise of DVDs seems to have put the final nail in the coffin for Betamax home players.
Some industry-watchers think this could turn into a struggle like that between the Betamax and VHS formats for video recorders.
When first introduced, the Betamax VCR may have been technically superior to its VHS rival, but it was a dead-end design.
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Betamax in which one format prevailed, but the analogy is poor because Sony, Betamax' main backer, had the more expensive option.
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The Betamax lost out because, unlike the VHS machine, it couldn't record for the full three hours needed to cover a baseball game.
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If so, the Memory Stick will join the likes of the Betamax and MiniDisc in the halls of bygone Sony standards.
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The now-famous tussle between video formats - VHS and Betamax - interestingly saw Toshiba as a partner rather than a rival to Sony.
Betamax lovers became so passionate about the format in the face of competition from VHS that they set up the Betaphile Club in 1988.
"The pressure is more on Sony because it was on the losing end in the Betamax-VHS battle and it knows Toshiba has a better product, " says Haskins.
So obsolete, in fact, that it may quickly join the ranks of such Sony success stories as the hard drive floppy disk and the Betamax video format.
But the appeals court disagreed, saying the technology was more equivalent to the video recorders upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its precedent-setting Betamax case in 1982.
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My brother and I dropped the stack of Betamax tapes on the coffee table and got to work, two or three movies on Friday night, the rest on Saturday.
But in the short term, a number of competing e-book technologies will, like VHS and Betamax before them, have to punch each other to death in a brutal, Darwinian winnowing process.
Some 2.3 million Betamax machines were sold worldwide in its peak year, 1984, but it soon went downhill as VHS became the format of choice for the film rental industry and in homes.
Does he watch old films on Betamax?
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The court considered the precedent of Sony's Betamax video-recording technology, which had faced a lawsuit brought by Disney and Universal in 1984 calling for a ban on the system because it would allow infringement of their copyrighted material.
The situation in some ways may be a replay of a 1984 Supreme Court case in which the MPAA tried to stop Sony from selling its Betamax VCR, according to Andrew Bridges, a copyright attorney at Palo Alto, Calif.
It had stayed out of the videocassette recorder format wars in the 1970s, when Sony's Betamax faced off with Matsushita's VHS. Toshiba is paying eventual winner Matsushita hefty amounts in license fees so it can make its own VHS machines.
"On the other hand, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Sony Betamax case several years ago, technology that has substantial non-infringing uses cannot be outlawed simply because pirates might also use the technology for infringing activities, " Weiss said.
Although many felt Betamax was the superior format, most cite the longer recording length of VHS tapes - three hours versus one - and the cheaper manufacturing costs for VHS machines as the main factors why VHS eventually won out.
Both the Aereo and Dish technologies rely on the 1984 Supreme Court holding in the Betamax case, which made it clear that consumer recording technology, in that case the VCR, is legal if it has uses that do not infringe copyright law.
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