U-matic

~ the obituary ~

The cassette is about the size of a hardcover book and heavier than it looks. Inside it is three quarters of an inch of tape, which is why everyone in the business called the format three-quarter-inch rather than by its name. The tape gets pulled out of the shell and wrapped around a spinning drum in the shape of a letter U, and that is the whole reason for the word U-matic.

What made it matter in 1971 was the shell. Video before this meant open reels that a person threaded by hand, on machines that cost as much as a car and required somebody who knew how to load them. Sony put the tape in a box, and the operation became dropping the box into a slot.

Sony showed a prototype in October 1969 and then did something companies rarely do, which was to agree the standard with Panasonic and JVC in March 1970 before selling anything. The same cassette ran in machines badged U-Vision and U-VCR. The first commercial model, the VO-1600 in September 1971, had a television tuner built into it, because Sony expected people to record broadcasts at home. The price settled that. What could afford the machine was an organization, so U-matic went to corporate communications departments and to schools, and by 1974 it was standard equipment in both.

Then the news found it. The portable VO-3800 arrived the same year, and a camera operator could carry the recorder on a shoulder strap and hand a tape to an editor who put it on air within the hour. Film had to be developed first. Within about five years the 16mm news camera was finished as a working tool, and the reason was a beige plastic box with two reels in it.

This one is on the site as something I only ever saw the output of. U-matic never had a home phase anywhere on earth, so there is no country where a household remembers the object, only the broadcasts that came off it. The tape a family in Turkey could actually own was VHS, and the distance between those two things is not a border, it is a purchase order. I watched a great deal of television that had passed through one of these decks without any way of knowing that it had.

~ the case file ~

~ the news came back on tape ~

Electronic news gathering is a phrase that sounds like marketing and was in fact a scheduling change. A film crew shot, drove the film to a lab, waited for it to be processed, then cut it, which put a hard floor under how fast a story could reach air. A tape crew shot and drove back, and that was the end of the list.

Local stations rebuilt their day around the difference. The evening bulletin could carry something that had happened in the afternoon, and reporters started going out for stories that had not finished yet. The cameras stayed heavy and the batteries stayed bad for another decade, but the clock had already moved, and it never moved back.

~ what betacam took ~

Sony kept improving it. Hi-band came in 1976 with the top-loading BVU-200 and better color, and the original spec was renamed Lo-band by everyone who now had something better. The BVU-800 series pushed the carrier frequency up to 1.2 MHz and reached 330 lines of horizontal resolution under the name SP, with Dolby noise reduction on the audio. The BVU-900 series was the last broadcast U-matic Sony built.

The thing that ended it was also Sony. Betacam SP put a comparable picture on half-inch tape in a smaller cassette, and by the early 1990s it had taken the broadcast work, leaving U-matic to corporate video and budget programme making. A first-generation U-matic SP recording and a Beta SP recording were hard to tell apart, which is the polite way of saying the newer format won on everything except picture.

~ the three endings ~

Formats die more than once. The broadcast decks stopped being made when Betacam took the market, and that is the ending most people would date it to. Sony went on manufacturing the cassettes for another decade or so, because thousands of institutions still had working machines and a working machine needs stock, and that supply ended in June 2004. Technical support outlived even that, running until 2016.

The last ending is still in progress and it belongs to archives. Enormous amounts of television and local record sit on U-matic tape, and reading any of it now depends on a shrinking population of decks and on the smaller population of engineers who can still align one. Preservation programs list the format at high risk for exactly that reason. A tape is not dead while the tape survives; it is dead when the last machine that can play it stops.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »