Do used betacam sp tapes have value?
 

Hi.

I have several hundred once-used Betacam SP tapes of varying lengths in their cases. Are they worth anything or should I chuck them?

Thanks.

It depends what's on them.
If it's off the air recordings from the 70's there might very well be some interest in them.

They are all technical lectures and presentations from the IEEE and AT&T from the 70s to the early 90s.

The content may have value if copies of it were not preserved by the IEEE and AT&T.

The cassettes may have value to folks like me who collect outdated recording formats and want a few dozen tapes for each format they own. If the content has no value, then I'd try putting one lot of ~10 tapes at a time on ebay for 5-15$ starting bid per lot and see what they do. Even ~1$ per tape for several hundred tapes is better than 0$ trashing something that is no longer being made.

If the tapes are truely 70's the ATT tapes may be interesting if they have some of their technical operations documented. ATT was the long-lines of all three networks in the day. On Friday afternoons after the networks went dark after the soaps for the afternoon, ATT would feed a BW program explaining all the weekend NFL timings and patchings for Sunday games.

It was a treat to watch. A bunch of guys in white shirts and ties with shirt-pocket pencil protectors in place explaining every hard-patch from stadium to NY, all the patch points along the way, all the times that a second game should be patched to NY, and all the patches from NY to the regions that would get any game. It went for 20-30 minutes on our feed at my CBS affilliate.

This ATT video from 1967 shows a bit of the ATT video at 13:00 in. (And some looks at early color from the day). And then more on voice/teletype services. This is how it used to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAJpionUxJ8

Betacam has large and small cassettes. The small-format Betacam SP tapes are usable in ED Beta VCRs, and the BCT-90 small-format tape is equivalent to an EL-750 (three hour) ED Beta tape, which was a size never sold as a true ED Beta cassette.

Betacam SP was not created until the late 80's. It is still a very viable format for youtube. I would be interested in some of your tapes, especially the 90 minute ones and if they were made by Sony.