[Tokra]

Betamax was a flop only in marketing.

That's very true. Betamax had much better quality than VHS and it worked easier. VHS had the awkward going into the VCR, a door had to open, the mechanism had to grasp the tape to make it work. Remeber the "clunk clunk" noises when you inserted a VHS tape?

I think what probably boosted VHS over Beta was the fact that VHS could fit 6 (and even 8) hours on a single tape while Beta was restricted to 2 hours. The quality of the picture was certainly much better on a Beta tape.

[discostu]

One thing people forget when they talk about the video quality of VHS vs Beta is that VHS was still better than most people got on their antenna most of the time (unless you had a really good antenna and were watching a channel with a solid signal). For most consumers “better than what I got” is good enough.