by Michael Bird
Bird’s Eye View
On this week in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in a landmark case you may or may not remember: Universal vs. Sony.
Akio Morita of Sony developed the Betamax recorder and released it to the American market in 1976. Morita always defended his product, and coined the phrase “time shift” for viewers to be able to record and watch programs later.
Hollywood studio heads were exploding. Lew Wasserman of Universal/MCA had a competing product called Discovision in development. A memorable feature of Discovision and similarly-styled products was a large cartridge or disc that held one movie on it, yours for a very expensive price – but you could watch these films whenever you wanted.
Universal and Walt Disney sued Sony, charging copyright infringement, in 1976. The case went to trial in 1979, with Sony emerging as the winner. In 1981, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned this decision. By this time, the Matsushita Corporation had introduced a competitor to Beta, called VHS (Video Home System).
In the intervening years, Sony had inadvertently given out secrets of its success – riding high on the sales of Beta videocassettes, Sony revealed key components of its technology in manufacturing Beta machines.
So, by 1981, a format war was on: Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Aiwa, and Pioneer manufactured Beta machines and videotapes, while JVC, Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Akai made VHS products.
Our family purchased a VCR in 1982, at a cost of around $500. Earlier recorders had been as much as $2,000 and far beyond the price range for a middle-class family. But by 1982, everyone was getting into the act.
Ours was purchased at Wilson’s on East South Boulevard in Montgomery, and we rented videotapes from The Record Shop (now Cohen’s) for $5.00 a week. Our first rental was the box-office bomb (though still one of my favorites), Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly.
Big and clunky by today’s standards, our VCR was about as wide as the actual television set on which it sat atop; the videocassette was inserted into a pop-up tray. Launching the Space Shuttle would have been easier than programming the complex timer. However, once we figured it out, I was able to watch time-shifted episodes of “Days of our Lives” and “As the World Turns” after school. (When “As the World Turns” was cancelled in 2010, I gave the soaps up for good, but it was a three-decade devotion.)
The VCR rocked along until the early 2000s, when it was supplanted by the DVD player. DVD and Blu-Ray, the high definition version, now face competition from online streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, not to mention the fact that DVRs now come with most cable boxes. In short, “time shifting,” as Akio Morita called it, is now so much a part of our lives it seems quaint that there was ever something called videotape.
VHS survives today in a niche market, mainly for dirty movies. The last Beta machine was manufactured in 2002. And thirty years ago this week, the issue was so important that the United States Supreme Court pondered the legality of “time shifting”. Time has certainly shifted now, hasn’t it?
Michael Bird is band director and webmaster for Tallassee City Schools and co-hosts the “Saturday Morning Show with Michael Bird and Scott Adcock” on 580 WACQ and FM 101.1.
