[toomuchtodo]

Betamax was arguably better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

[SoftTalker]

Not in ways that the market cared about.

[mbreese]

Arguably better quality, but at the cost of being shorter. In the great trade off of time, size, and quality, I think VHS chose a better combination.

[a96]

Importantly, it was so short that it was inadequate. Go beats no go every time.

[rapnie]

It depends which definition of "better" you use. VHS won the adoption race, so it was better there. While Betamax may have been technologically superior, in hindsight we can say it apparently failed to address other key aspects of the technology adoption lifecycle.

[MBCook]

Who cares? It couldn’t hold a movie on one tape. Thats what the market ended up selecting for. As soon as renting movies took off Beta lost.

When they compromised quality to get there, they were just more expensive.

And later S-VHS improved quality anyway.