Our Crowdfunding Groups
Our crowdfunding campaign has ended, but you can still Save The Betas by clicking here.
45 years ago, Americans gathered around their TVs to watch a president losing his grip on power. As the Watergate hearings unfolded, UCLA Professor Paul Rosenthal recognized that these events were an important piece of history and recorded them for future generations. Inspired by this success, UCLA began a program to preserve all of the television news viewable in Los Angeles, and for the last four decades we have continued doing exactly that.
When Sony introduced the Betamax system in 1975, it was revolutionary. Betamax VCRs and tapes were the first affordable TV recording solution, and also had higher resolution and better picture quality than VHS, which was introduced soon after. Groundbreaking Betamax technology is what allowed UCLA to start recording all of the local, national, and cable news in Los Angeles beginning in 1979 and continuing through the mid-1990s.
Unfortunately, there are precious few Betamax VCRs available to play these tapes back. While many still argue that Betamax was a superior recording format, Betamax clearly lost the "format war" to VHS well before most of our current students were even born. The last consumer Betamax player introduced in the United States came out in 1993, and Sony stopped manufacturing Betamax players entirely a few years later. Because of this scarcity, it is difficult to find working players, and those that are available are either damaged or prohibitively expensive.
For example, a refurbished, working copy of the last U.S. Betamax player (Sony's SL-HF2000) costs $995 (plus shipping). The high-end EDV-9500 model costs an eye-watering $2,495 (plus shipping). Prices will only go up as these units become rarer and harder to repair, and as the people who know how to repair Betas become harder to repair, themselves.
UCLA is currently embarking on an ambitious plan to digitize and preserve our television heritage. When completed, these historic news programs will be accessible online for scholars and the public through the UCLA Library. The student workers in our lab have already digitized tens of thousands of hours of newer VHS tapes, but we need your help to preserve our more endangered Betamaxes. You can help by:
Help us save our history.
Help us save our betas!
For $10, we can digitize the content of one Betamax tape, preserving its content for future generations. (fully tax deductible)
Is there a special day in history or your own life? For $50, you can sponsor our digitization of that day's news so it will be preserved forever. We will include your name and that date (between 1980-2005) on our honor roll of timesavers and on our next social media shout-out. (fully tax deductible)
For $250, we can buy a solid, low-end Betamax VCR from eBay and digitize lots of tapes. When it eventually dies, we can use its parts so others may live. We'll also include your name on our donor honor roll and on our next social media shout-out. (fully tax deductible)
For $350, you can sponsor our digitization of an entire week of news so it will be preserved forever. We will include your name and that week (between 1980-2005) on our honor roll of timesavers and on our next social media shout-out.
With your donation, we can purchase a guaranteed refurbished, higher-end, new(ish) Betamax VCR. In addition to including you on our honor roll of donors, we will use a fancy Dymo adhesive label to identify you as the donor and include an action shot of the machine working in our lab online and on our next social media shout-out. (fully tax deductible)
For $1,000, we can digitize 2/3rds of an entire month of news. You will be invited for a tour of our lab, including a pizza lunch with our student workers. We would also include your picture on our next social media shout-out. (a tax deductible donation amount of $989)
The highest level of contribution would fund the permanent preservation of an entire year's worth of television history. For $18,000, you can ensure that future generations are able to see and learn from their past. In recognition of your generous contribution, you would be invited to join Prof. Tim Groeling and our student workers for a tour of our lab and a lunch at the Luskin Conference Center. (a tax deductible donation of $17,974).