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Era 1 · Before the web: tapes, catalogues and pay TV

1971–1988VHS won the format war; Sony began producing its own…

JVC

VHS

JVC released the VHS format in 1976, a year after Sony and its Betamax, and openly licensed it to any manufacturer. By 1984 the VHS format was backed by 40 companies against Sony's dozen, and by 1988 Sony itself gave up and began making VHS equipment.

Founders Kenjiro Takayanagi (head of JVC's video division, engineer) · Shizuo Takano and Yuma Shiraishi (engineers who developed the VHS format)
Domains —
hardwareformat-warlicensingdistributionpayments-adjacent

In brief

JVC introduced the VHS format in September 1976, a year after Sony with its Betamax and after Sony had already sold more than 100,000 of its machines. JVC had neither a technological advantage nor a head start; it had a single bet: open the format to any manufacturer. Just four months later, in January 1977, four more Japanese companies were making VHS equipment; by 1984 there were 40 companies behind VHS against Sony's dozen, and in 1988 Sony admitted defeat and began making VHS recorders. The story is worth telling today because the myth of the VHS victory is usually reduced either to price or to pornography, while the records show a third answer: what won was the speed with which a coalition of manufacturers and distributors formed around an open standard.

How it started (the founders)

VHS was not invented by entrepreneurs; it was invented by engineers inside a large corporation. Kenjiro Takayanagi, the father of Japanese television (he built the first TV set from domestically made components in 1939), headed the video division of JVC (Victor Company of Japan) from July 1946; JVC itself was almost twenty years old by then: a subsidiary of the American Victor Talking Machine Company, bought by RCA in 1929 and fully Japanese by 1938. Takayanagi rose to managing director in 1953 and retired in 1974, two years before the release of VHS, but it was under him that engineers Shizuo Takano and Yuma Shiraishi, who had been developing the format since 1971, rose.

A key structural detail: in 1953, when JVC was in difficulty, Matsushita Electric bought 50% of its shares, not as an acquisition but as competitive cooperation that preserved JVC's independence. This decided the outcome of the format war two decades in advance: in 1974, seven months before the launch of Betamax, Sony showed the prototype to executives of Matsushita, JVC, and RCA, proposing that they simply join; JVC refused to develop someone else's technology, and Konosuke Matsushita, offended that he had not been invited to discuss the design, refused as well. When a coalition had to be built around VHS two years later, the Matsushita–JVC pairing became the ready-made core of the future family of licensees.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. The engineer at the origins of JVC's video division retired two years before VHS was released. Kenjiro Takayanagi headed the division from 1946 to 1974 and did not see his creation's triumph as a sitting executive: the format was brought to market by his protégés Takano and Shiraishi.
  2. The price gap at launch was almost imperceptible. $1,200 against $1,295 for Betamax, a difference of ~7.5%, and by early 1979 prices had converged at $995–1050. The legend of cheap VHS does not survive a check against the numbers.
  3. VHS's breakthrough in the US came not from marketing but from a compromise on cassette length that RCA bargained for. RCA insisted on longer recording, JVC refused to sacrifice the picture, and the prototype was built by Matsushita, JVC's second shareholder, not by JVC itself.
  4. An open license did not mean a free one. One retelling describes JVC's model as handing out the technology without licensing, but the video share of JVC's revenue grew from 6% to 69%, and profit grew 10 times by 1982: the money was collected reliably, and what was open was the circle of partners estimate.
  5. Early home video suffered an acute shortage of legal content on both platforms. When Andre Blay went around the studios in 1976 offering to license their films, only one responded: Fox, with just 50 titles. This vacuum, not studio strategy, left room on the shelves for adult video (see "Legend vs. the record").

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The growth lever was not advertising but a single deal: with RCA in March 1977, when VHS had only four Japanese partners against Sony's one-year head start and 100,000+ Betamax units sold. RCA demanded longer recording time; JVC refused to sacrifice the picture, but Matsushita, JVC's second shareholder since 1953, built a suitable prototype. In August–October 1977 RCA released the VBT200 at $1,000 for 4 hours of recording, and by 1978 it already held 36% of the US videocassette recorder market, more than Sony had gained in two years as a monopolist in its own market. The effect for JVC was just as sharp: the video share of its revenue grew from 6% to 69%, and profit grew 10 times by 1982.

The paired story

JVC and Sony (Betamax) are two sides of one decision made before the format war even began: in 1974 Morita showed the Betamax prototype to executives of Matsushita, JVC, and RCA and proposed that they simply join Sony's finished product. JVC and Matsushita refused, not for technical reasons but out of managerial pride and strategic calculation, and that refusal created a vacuum that the open VHS license filled two years later. Both companies figure in the same myth of pornography as the decisive factor, and in both dossiers the records downgrade this myth in the same way: the outcome turned on who first assembled a coalition around the format. Sony assembled no one, while JVC, with Matsushita and RCA, assembled forty companies by 1984 against Sony's dozen. Sony's years, founders, and outcome are taken unchanged from its own analysis.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. Don't come to competitors with a bare invitation to join; bring the terms of a deal. Sony lost two future allies of the VHS camp by offering them nothing but submission to a finished design.
  2. Openness is about the circle of partners, not about giving up money. JVC did not give the format away for free and still grew its profit 10 times; limit not the number of partners but the terms of entry.
  3. One deal with someone else's ready-made distribution can be worth more than a year of organic growth. The partnership with RCA in 1977 gave VHS 36% of the US market within a year.
  4. Don't mistake a scarce early market for lasting demand. Adult content was a visible segment while there was not enough of a mainstream catalog (1977–1978); once the studios began licensing films and the market grew by an order of magnitude, the segment's share was diluted.
  5. A neat single explanation of a victory almost always oversimplifies several parallel causes. Neither price alone nor porn alone explains the outcome by itself: what worked was a combination of price, the compromise on recording length, and the speed at which the coalition of partners was assembled.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

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