How VHS Beat Betamax
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, format wars are nothing new—Edison and Berliner battled it out over phonograph methods, and 8-tracks and cassettes clashed in the ’60s and 70s—but those battles took place away from the public eye. The fight between VHS and Betamax played out in living rooms across America. Here to tell the story of how VHS came out victorious is Bill “Engineer Guy” Hammack.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:04.5 | Adventure should never come with a pause button. |
| 0:07.1 | Remember Movie Pass? |
| 0:08.4 | All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks? |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:13.9 | And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told. |
| 0:17.4 | Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of movie pass who got pushed out of the company |
| 0:21.6 | he built. |
| 0:22.8 | Everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it. |
| 0:27.3 | And then boom, it's everywhere. |
| 0:29.3 | And that was that moment. |
| 0:30.7 | Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:49.9 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in |
| 0:55.0 | between, including your stories, send them to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:59.2 | That's Our American Stories.com. |
| 1:01.9 | They're some of our favorites. |
| 1:03.5 | Over the years, there have been many format and console wars, including Nintendo versus Sega, |
| 1:09.7 | PlayStation versus Xbox, Apple versus Android. |
| 1:13.6 | But there was one full-fledged format war that ruled them all. |
| 1:17.6 | Years before we had to decide between streaming the latest video |
| 1:21.6 | or taking it home on DVD or Blu-ray, |
| 1:25.6 | a format war between Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS began. |
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