[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.