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In July 1969, the name Apollo 11 became indelibly etched in the minds of people around the world when it became the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon. It was in October of the same year that Sony introduced its  Color Videoplayer, which used a three-quarter inch video cassette tape and had a maximum playing time of 90 minutes.
Ibuka was greeted with gasps of disbelief from the journalists who had gathered for the occasion. He announced that the rectangular box beside him was a color video player that operated using the small cassette tape about one half the size of a magazine and weighing approximately 450 grams lying beside it. Sony had delivered a product that lived up to its promotional slogan, A New Era for Community and Family Lifestyles. Record and playback functions were now as simple to use as placing a cassette tape in the unit and touching a button. The inconvenient process of feeding a reel tape through the VTR's record and playback heads was a thing of the past. The new Sony machine allowed people to watch their favorite movies, plays, or television programs in color, at their convenience and in the comfort of their own living rooms. A major Japanese daily newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, heralded the introduction of this new video media with the headline, The Era of Packaged Movies and Film Entertainment is Around the Corner. The video tape recorder was on the verge of becoming a household item.
Around this time, a number of other companies announced that they were introducing cassette-based machines using different formats. Sony took the lead in calling for the adoption of a unified system and standards to facilitate the worldwide spread of the video tape recorder. In March 1970, Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Victor Co. of Japan, Ltd. (JVC), and five non-Japanese companies reached agreement on unified standards. Thus, the U Format was born, and for the first time Sony, Matsushita, and JVC agreed to a common set of standards for a product. In the negotiations, Sony had conceded one point. While Sony had proposed a cassette tape 20% smaller than the finally agreed upon size, Matsushita and JVC thought that such a small cassette tape would be too difficult and costly to manufacture. Sony agreed to compromise. In any case, a set of standards had been decided and the way was now clear to commercially develop products.
In September 1971, Sony unveiled a new color video cassette system, the U-matic, at the Keidanren (Japan Federation of Economic Organizations) in Tokyo. Sony also introduced products that would use the new video cassette tape, the VP-1100 video cassette player, which had a price tag of 238,000 yen, and the VO-1700 video cassette recorder, priced at 358,000 yen. The new models would be mass-produced at the Atsugi factory, headed by Akinori Takasaki.
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 | Ibuka announces the release of the Sony
Color Videoplayer, a prototype
of the U-matic VTR. |
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Ibuka, Morita and others thought they could increase the popularity of video tape recorders by persuading movie production companies to reproduce their vast film libraries on U-matic video cassette tapes. This would enable people to watch films in stereo on their own televisions. The market for blank video cassette tapes to record the enormous number of television programs transmitted every day also held great potential.
Yet even though the process of establishing a market for cassette tape-based products was truly under way, initial results were not as pleasing as Ibuka and his colleagues had hoped. To begin, color televisions were found in less than 40% of Japanese households. The time was not yet ripe for the widespread diffusion of color video cassette players in Japan. In addition, the machines were still relatively large and expensive.
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