Sony had managed to bring the CV-2000, the world's first home VTR, to market. They succeeded too in addressing the various issues accompanying the CV-2000, such as color functionality, transitioning to a cassette format, and tape autoloading, with the U-matic. Though both products were exemplars of Sony's technological prowess, neither product managed to truly become a household item. Given that fewer than 40 percent of households even had a color television at home in the early 70s, technology had not yet progressed to the point where the idea of enjoying recorded movies and TV shows at home made sense.

Yet looking forward to when such a reality would inevitably come to pass, it was clear that Sony needed to stick the landing with their next home VTR. "We'll need to be able to handle a cassette at least this big," said Ibuka when considering the issue, holding up the Sony company notebook - the same size as a standard Japanese paperback novel. The development team immediately jumped on developing a new VTR able to handle this requirement.

Making use of their experience with the U-matic, the first VCR to use the new paperback-sized videocassette, the SL-6300, was soon made commercially available in 1975, debuting under the new name "Betamax." Color TVs had reached a 90 percent adoption rate by this point, and with the birth of the Betamax, the era when TV shows could only be viewed live was in the past. Viewers could now bend time as they pleased, Morita defined this new technology's ability as "time-shifting," since now TV shows could be recorded and enjoyed whenever and as many times as one pleased, far after the live broadcast had ended.

Soon enough, it was 1976. On top of being Sony's thirtieth anniversary, Morita boldly declared the year to be the "year zero of video," predicting the coming age of VTR technology, despite domestic VTR demand still wavering below one hundred thousand total units for all of Japan.
Doubt remained throughout the industry that VTRs would ever proliferate to the home setting, until an event that would define a generation came sweeping the world off its feet: the Victor Company of Japan (JVC), Sony's former collaborator on the U-matic format, announced their new and independently developed VTR format - the VHS.

The Betamax and VHS formats were not compatible with each other's devices, and while Betamax prioritized compactness and image quality, the VHS boasted a hefty two-hour-long recording capacity per cassette. The launch of these two cassette types nearly simultaneously onto the market marked the beginning of a legendary format war.

Even after the development and release of both U-matic and Betamax, Sony continued to take on new challenges in the video industry. Amidst a push for greater recording density using even smaller equipment, Sony chose the daring plan to differentiate itself and establish another new market by halving the dimensions originally used for the Betamax. "We might as well try to increase the recording density by tenfold as well," Ibuka boldly declared. It just so happened that semiconductor CCDs, which would come to replace the camera pickup tube as the new "eye" for cameras around the world, were then starting to get off the ground (see Volume 2 Chapter 5). Iwama had also given the green light to use CCDs to develop an integrated video camera capable of both recording and playback.

Once again starting development from scratch, Sony would announce their work on the VideoMovie simultaneously in New York and Tokyo in July 1980. The revolutionary device combined a CCD color camera with an 8mm videocassette recorder into one device, weighing only two kilograms (about 4.4 pounds). The event served as more than a simple announcement, however. "From our experience with Betamax and VHS, we would like to avoid incompatibility issues moving forward," said Sony, inviting other companies to meet and decide on a standard for the next generation of recording devices. One hundred and twenty-two companies answered the call, attending a meeting held in March 1982 to standardize the 8mm video format, eventually leading to a finalized standard in April 1984.

In parallel to these efforts, the development and design teams were hard at work developing their first 8mm model video camera.
Minoru Morio and other development team members made the move to the Atsugi factory in November 1981, joining up with Shigeyuki Ochi's team, which had already started work on image sensors by then.

Development was initially conducted on both the CCD device and Sony's Trinicon camera pickup tube simultaneously, the latter of which was treated as a contingency plan in case CCD development failed to be completed on time. Yet as the Trinicon version of the product was just about to be finished, Ochi's team received a new order: "Forget about the backup option, we need the CCD's superior image quality." With their backs against the wall, Ochi's team put in blood, sweat, and tears in order to finally succeed in producing a 250,000-pixel CCD for the project.

Once the grueling development process was over, it was finally time to announce the first 8mm video camera, the CCD-V8, in January 1985. After conducting a live demonstration of the camera at the announcement event, reporters were amazed at the superb image quality provided by the CCD. The excitement was palpable for the new product, which was set to go on sale on the 21st of that same month for two-hundred-eighty thousand yen.

Although Sony had now established the 8mm video format with its own CCD-V8, JVC was quick to fire back with its own VHS-C integrated video camera, which used the titular VHS-C cassette format, a cassette one fourth the size of a standard VHS tape. Inviting electronics manufacturers worldwide to instead adopt the VHS-C format, the format wars between Sony and JVC only intensified as each sought to outdo the other in terms of product size and weight.