November 10, 2015

You might have thought the Betamax video format died a long time ago, but it turns out that Sony has continued to sell the cassettes – that is until next year.

The Japanese electronics company has announced that it will stop shipping Betamax video cassettes in March 2016. The format was originally developed in 1975, but ultimately lost out to VHS video cassettes in the 1980s.

At its peak, around 50 million Betamax cassettes were sold in 1984 while Betamax video recording equipment sold around 18 million units in total.

But with changing consumer demands and the ending of analogue terrestrial television, Sony has decided to can Betamax video cassettes, it revealed in a press release.