Taping Untapped Markets

Few Americans have ever seen one, but the videotape recorder is playing a steadily bigger part in their lives. It is a device that records and stores images and sounds on magnetic tape and plays them back immediately--or hours or years later. About a third of the shows on TV are so recorded. American Airlines and Pan American use videotape for their in-flight entertainment. The New York Telephone Co. helps train its salesmen by videotaping them during practice sessions and showing them playbacks of their mistakes. Yonkers Raceway uses the videotape to judge photo finishes. Many schools have begun to use videotape for classroom teaching, and several manufacturers use recordings of complex industrial processes to track down production problems.

Simplified Recorder. Although videotape recorders were first marketed in 1957, their high prices--ranging from $10,000 to $100,000--long limited their sales. But prices are starting to come down, and sales are going up. Manufacturers of videotape recorders reached $40 million in sales last year; the industry now stands on the verge of a vast expansion. Sales are expected to rise to $200 million within five years, and several new companies are entering the field. Last week California's Ampex Corp., which pioneered videotape recordings and still controls about two-thirds of the market, introduced a new simplified recorder that will sell for $3,950, less than half the cost of other models now available.

The greatest market potential for videotape recorders--the U.S. home--is still untapped. Inexpensive portable video outfits could take much of the fuss out of making home movies. Unlike film, videotape does not have to be sent out for developing or threaded into a projector, can be erased and used repeatedly without deterioration. It can be played back immediately from the videotape recorder onto the nearest TV screen. Videotape recorders can be adjusted to turn on TV sets and record favorite programs while people are away from home, enabling them to play back the programs later. Eventually, videotaped news and sports events, plays and educational shows could be sold or rented for replay on home TV sets.

Such possibilities are spurring the trend to simpler and less expensive recorders. Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp. is developing a home videotape recorder that it hopes to market for $500. Sony, which already sells expensive recorders to TV stations and airlines, plans to introduce a set in the U.S. this spring that will sell for about $1,000. Both Ampex and RCA are working on home recorders of their own.

Complex Experiment. The new Ampex model, while still too expensive for most families, should bring videotape recorders within the price range of most of the nation's 30,000 school districts, the second biggest potential market. In the classroom, teachers can use videotape to record important telecasts--such as Churchill's funeral or a papal coronation--and then play them back during school hours on classroom TV screens. With auxiliary cameras, some schools are already taping complex laboratory experiments, demonstrations and lectures by talented teachers, then showing them over and over again in the classroom.

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