Oh Sony. Have we learned NOTHING from SuperAIT? It's deja freakin' vu all over again, as the grim spectres of AIT and Super AIT tape are coming alive again. Meanwhile the good ship Sony is sinking in the west, the crew distracted by a tape technology sideshow. Consider these two recent stories: Sony reckons it will make a $1.3bn loss after selling off its failing PC …
"Nobody's knocking Beta. Betamax, however - that's a different story."
I don't get what this part (specifically) is saying- as far as video formats go, "Beta" *was* just a marketing synonym for Betamax. (I'm assuming you didn't mean the Greek letter, since the context made the meaning obvious).
Sony says the new manufacturing technique is commercially viable and it's working to develop it into a data cartridge that can store 185TB of uncompressed data, although it isn't saying when. The company also suggests that greater densities could be achieved by using even smaller nanocrystals.
While some analysts have been predicting the death of tape for some time, it's still very popular for certain types of storage. Long-term backup is the main market these days, in addition to processes that are very data heavy. CERN makes extensive use of tape to record the findings of the Large Hadron Collider, for example.
Provided Sony can adapt the technique to mass production – and at a commercially viable price – this new tape could put its competition in trouble. While tape densities have been increasing slowly, this kind of technological leap could seriously disrupt the market.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/30/sony_nanotechnicians_invent_magnetic_tape_that_stores_148_gb_per_square_inch/
There must be something in the water at Sony HQ, because they keep doing this. Rather nifty technology that is incompatible with everything else and introduced at exquisitely inconvenient points in the market cycle. Remember MemoryStick? Betamax? PFD? Sigh.
It must be painful to believe that you have the best ideas but that the market stubbornly refuses to adopt them, preferring instead to go with mass market cheap-n-cheerful. But that's the dilemma of R&D in technology for you. (Hello, Token Ring. Nice to see you again.)
But Sony goes one better and introduces technology that isn't even compatible with themselves.
They refused to release minidisk as a computer data format ( 78Mb on a disk 1/4 the size of a floppy ) because of concerns from their movie studio that it would lead to piracy.
it has to be no more than current top end, preferably median
it has to be 10x better than anything else
It has to be reliable (hello Jazz disk)
it has to have no competitor likely for 2 years, preferably 3.
Given the boggling amounts of data from astronomy and CERN, it _might_ get a run for biggest end of town and be ignored for mere enterprises, if and only if it is delivered at a fixed date, fully working
chances of that? guesstimate is 5% given all megacorps attitude to their technical staff. Still, licensing to LTO consortium might be a steady legit IP income.
As others said, betamax... DAT, Minidisc, ATRAC over MP3. They keep thinking, like "Oh, if we come up with something good but keep strict control we can have 100% of the market!!!!" on things like this, and forget the part of the economics course about demand curves where if an "inferior" good is available much less expensively, many customers will choose that good instead.
And those computers! Man, I've seen a few Sony notebooks and they were all VERY weird. Weird BIOSes, hardware that was non-standard just to be non-standard. You know, I saw one with a fingerprint reader, with a chip fairly well supported on a variety of OSes. But, instead of Sony just supplying some software on their Windows install to make the chip useful, they had flashed in Sony-proprietary firmware that completely changed the chip's behavior so it'd ONLY work with their software.
I call the concept 'Marketing As Management'. Because of the supreme personality clash between the marketing mind and the creative producing mind, having a company run by marketing is doom. Marketing folks cannot and will not comprehend the productive mind and will go out of their way to subjugate it and demoralize it. Once the creativity has been wrung out of a company, all it has left is selling the usual stuff it had before the Marketing As Management horror took hold.
Until such time as Sony boots out their marketing guy CEO and replaces him with a productivity oriented CEO, the company is in constant FAIL mode. So long Sony!
Is that true though? Marketing is about creating demand, R&D is about engineers trying to do funky stuff. Most Sony stuff is technically clever (Beta, Minidisc, etc.) but they fail to convey to the market why their stuff is so brilliant that it should corner said market.
Sony is quite famous for its Marketing own goals:
Anyone remember the borderline racist - black vs white (PSP i think?)
Oh and the 'youth' orientated fake youtube messages showing their lovefor the console (also PSP I think).
Not forgetting their total comms mismanagement of losing(giving?) everyones data out from PS3.
I also have qualms about their PS4 advertising which appears to show gamers as a bunch of fantasists who slip in and out of reality/games as they walk down the street, its slickly done but not ideal from the 'wont somebdoy think of the children' hyperbole.
Personally I'm a bit of a fan of Sony products..but their marketing is often really poorly thought out
The only way they could succeed against LTO is to release that 185TB tape well before everyone else does a similar size. If they could get it to market while LTO is still peddling 2.5/5/10TB raw data tapes, then companies will eat it up. They'd obviously have to price it at a sensible price also (something that Sony has historically had a problem doing), but they could definitely capture the market.
"They'd obviously have to price it at a sensible price also (something that Sony has historically had a problem doing), but they could definitely capture the market."
The customers they would be looking at with this are those big companies and institutions who actually have shed loads of data, not the average Joe. Not only will they need to have a tape, but also a working tape library. Add to that a guarantee that their products will be supported for 5-10 years with repair on site within 24 hours or less. Oh and next generations must be backwards compatible.
Now if they can satisfy all that, then they might have a market in governments, science, big corps who have to store lots of data etc.
If they can't, it's a fail right there before they even started. (Which is more likely)
I don't see why they couldn't provide all that. With this sort of product, you build the support around your target market. If you're creating a 185TB tape, then you'd obviously be aiming at big data - your CERNs and Facebooks of the world. Therefore, you realise they want 4 hour repair/replace on drives/libraries. They want tapes to last X number of uses. They want support to be available for however many years etc...
If Sony were to release such a product and *not* provide this support, then they'd deserve to fail!
Really? I think most financial analysts would disagree with you there. They might not exist in their exact current form, but they won't disappear. Their technology certainly won't disappear. This sort of technology could easily be farmed off into its own company...
Not to mention the fact that the company has 14tn Yen in assets. Around 10tn of that being physical or investment assets, rather than intangibles or good will. That's $136bn/$97bn. A fair amount they can work with to restructure... Even if they simply absorbed the losses and sold off assets, they could exist for decades yet.
1) Beta succeeded on a massive scale (far more profitable than VHS) Sony sold tens of billions worth of Beta over a period of 30 years. Ever watched a VHS or DVD? That was mastered on DigiBeta. Every non-U.S. TV studio has tens of thousands of Beta, Beta SP, DigiBeta, HDCAM and HDCAM SR tapes sucking up massive physical storage space. The local TV network by here has a giant warehouse here with close to a million beta tapes which cost $30-$100 a piece to buy... From Sony. Want to replace them? No problem! Just find a hard drive system able to store a million hours of footage at 250GB an hour... And is reliable. BTW, MTV used Beta for all music videos which filled multiple warehouses.
2) Sony tape formats aren't about data storage. They're about film/video storage. A modern film requires 10TB+ to transmit in master format and substantially more for raw asset storage. A single film will be copied onto hundreds of tapes for distribution to post production houses around the world. A massively overpriced proprietary format is a good thing since it's the preferred method of delivery by companies like Buena Vista who found the best DRM is the kind which requires special machines which cost obscene amounts to own. They love $50,000+ tape systems for raw footage delivery. MPLS networks are still to slow for this type of stuff.
Get your facts right... You're looking only at the surface and what you would buy.
CheesyTheClown: "Beta succeeded on a massive scale (far more profitable than VHS)"
(tl;dr response at end).
For someone who claims "Wow... What a crappy author!!!" and "get your facts right..." you're apparently being ignorant or disingenuous by conflating two different formats (i.e. Betamax and Betacam) as "Beta". Especially as the article itself specifically referred to "BetaMAX" and all the examples you gave were of BetaCAM derivatives.
To clarify:-
"Betamax" (sometimes marketed as "Beta") was the original consumer and low-end format released in the mid-70s, the one that went head-to-head with VHS and lost.
"Betacam" was a later (early-80s) format aimed at the professional market. The *original* version of Betacam could use the same blank cassettes as Betamax but even that used a very different and incompatible recording format (higher-quality and higher tape speed).
You refer to a whole load of "Beta" formats- some by their colloquial names, obscuring the fact that these were all derivatives of Betacam, not Betamax (i.e. "Beta SP" (i.e. BetaCAM SP), "DigiBeta" (i.e. Digital BetaCAM) as well as HDCAM and HDCAM SR). Later developments also included larger-format cassette shells that certainly wouldn't fit inside anyone's home Betamax recorder!
Yes, Betacam enjoyed some success in the professional market (especially for portable use AFAIK), but it wasn't the same as Betamax, and it's rather silly to compare Betacam- an almost exclusively higher-end professional format against VHS, a domestic and low-end non-broadcast format.
Further, you say that "Beta" was "far more profitable than VHS". In percentage terms, Betacam probably *did* make more, but in absolute terms the professional market would have been absolutely dwarfed by domestic users, so I doubt either "Beta" made more money than VHS.
TL;DR VERSION:- OP confusing- intentionally or otherwise- the domestic "Betacam" and pro "Betamax" formats as being the same thing when they weren't.
10 TB is not THAT big.
If you have a 1 Gb port (it is't THAT expensive): about 2,3 hours, probably more 3,5 hours in real conditions.
If you use multicast you can transmit the movie without problems. Fiber networks ARE ok for the task.
Note: I think you would like to encapsulate the movie with correctable CRC.
Around the time that the LS-120 floppy disk had a chance of getting a mainstream market Sony dragged out a version of their own.
The LS-120 discs were so damned expensive that not many people could buy them. Added to that there were rumours about them that put people off, which weren't quashed becasue of the small number of actual users.
So, did Sony bring out a device that was competitive? Or one that was more reliable?
Something that would take the market by storm?
What do you think.
The Sony device wasn't reliable- it had to be withdrawn and relaunched due to reliability issues (something I vaguely remember and Wikipedia confirms):-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
By that time, writable CDs were starting to become affordable, so it wasn't going to happen...
In addition to AIT and SAIT that always were niche products meant more to showcase their media manufacturing capabilities than to actually turn a huge profit. Sony OEMs a lot of LTO media and sells some under its own brand as well.
Nobody in their right mind ever suggested that Fujifilm would release a new tape format when they announced joint work on Barium Ferrite. Now they even dedicated a site to BaFe:
http://thefutureoftape.com/index.html
Sony stated that their technology would allow storing 74 more times data on a standard BaFe LTO-6 tape. Fujifilm demonstrated a 35 TB tape, Sony now claims they could manufacture tape up to 185 TB in the same format -- exactly 150 TB more.
Since Sony is a media supplier, they are naturally interested in being the chosen media provider. LTO Consortium decided to adopt BaFe for LTO-6 (and presumably LTO-7). If Sony plays this right, they can get the LTOC board to adopt this as media of choice for LTO-8 (and Oracle's T10000x, and presumably IBM's future 3592 drive) and then make money on licensing manufacturing to other media suppliers. Right now, all LTO-6 cartridges *must* be BaFe. Every cartridge sold is an extra solid profit for Fujifilm and Sony rightly wants to jump on that bandwagon.
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