Sony stops supplying Betamax cassettes

Sony stops supplying Betamax cassettes. The Japanese company has been producing the tires since 1975 and says it will stop deliveries in March 2016. The last Betamax equipment came from 2002.

The Betamax cassettes were the competitor of the VHS, or Video Home System, in the 1970s. In the end, that system won the battle for the place in Betamax’s living room. However, Sony is the developer of the Betamax format and is therefore the party that continued to supply the cassettes, especially because it has marketed a lot of Betamax equipment in the past. The production of recorders stopped already in 2002.

Even after that time, professional users continued to use the Betamax and SuperBetamax tires. The betacam is still in use with professional media: those cassettes have the same format but are not compatible. At the peak of Betamax, in 1984, Sony shipped 50 million copies of the magnetic tapes.

At the same time, Sony will stop supplying Micro MV cassettes. This is the smallest videotape format and is only used with certain Sony camcorders. In 2001, this format was introduced, and in 2005 the last Micro MV camcorder of the Japanese company went out of production. The well-known cleaning tapes of the formats are also being discontinued.