The full segment is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zHxXNC4H6Q
They start talking about some of the earliest forays into taping wrestling programs and making connections and trading with other fans. But from this timestamp, responding to a question about how much of his tape collection was Beta versus VHS, he notes that 40% of his collection is still Beta which is the lion's share of his tapes up through the 80s. However, he made the following comment which got me thinking here:
My question is, how prevalent was Beta in the anime tape trading circles, especially for those folks who were trading with people in Japan? I imagine this is limited to trading mostly in the early and mid 1980s? A few ads from magazines I have seem to start neglecting Beta by the mid/late 80s in favor of VHS and LaserDisc. Outside of ads though, I think I've only seen anime on Beta in the stray eBay listing 15 years ago or so. We were a VHS house and I only ever remember seing Beta tapes on the shelves at one local rental shop when I was really little. All of my anime tape trading was all in the 1990s when Beta was nothing but a punchline in the home consumer market.When I would get tapes from Japan, because I have all of [Giant] Baba's and [Antonio] Inoki's television programs from like 1981 until the early 1990s, those were on Beta. Because people in Japan were recording them on Beta, because that was the dominant format.
Or, maybe, is this a(nother?) case of wrestling fans being weird.?