[msla]

Betamax was behind VHS in a critical metric: Original Betamax tapes could only fit an hour of recorded TV, whereas the original VHS tapes could do two hours. This mean that a single VHS tape could fit a whole TV movie, for example, or a whole sports game, whereas Betamax could not. Recording off TV was a major use case for home videotapes in the era before the movie rental market existed, to the point Sony and Universal fought all the way to the Supreme Court to decide the legality of time-shifting, so VHS having double the capacity with identical or nearly-identical picture quality pretty well decided the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive...

https://medium.com/swlh/vhs-vs-beta-the-story-of-the-origina...

[ZiiS]

VHS was significantly cheeper which also helped.