[jjmarr]

Betamax had better picture quality but only had 1 hour of capacity. VHS had 2 hours. Consumers preferred not having to switch tapes to higher picture quality.

Convenience is a technical advantage. That's why streaming later beat Blu-ray despite a regression in picture quality.

[eggy]

From my comment below, we used Betamax back in 1982 for film class and would go back to editing it on a tape-to-tape deck, so starting with Betamax vs. VHS meant you had less degradation in the final edited product, since you started with higher quality. Sort of like editing RAW vs. JPEG photos nowadays to start with more resolution/information. For me streaming vs. my Blu-ray stuff was about cost. A $39 Blu-ray disc vs. a $12 movie or free movie with subscription. Amazon Music took away a purchase I had from 2014. I could no longer download it, since something changed with their licensing agreement. I have digitized my DVD/Blu-ray discs, since the discs don't last forever. I keep a streaming rez and a hi-rez copy of my faves.

[pbhjpbhj]

Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger? Remember laserdisc?

I remember watching something on Betamax, possibly Star Wars but have no recollection of changing tape. My dad was a teacher and had access to a VT player on my birthday. On other occasions he would bring home a BBC Microcomputer. Quite a treat when we couldn't afford to buy our own TV even.

Edit, seems Empire Strikes Back was a single tape - https://ebay.us/m/Ypz8SW

[jjmarr]

> Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger?

Originally, Betamax increased physical tape length, but cutting tape speed (like how vinyls can play at different RPMs) was a more economical way of cramming more hours onto the same tape by cutting quality.

Both VHS and Betamax went through multiple phases of this. Eventually VHS won by being cheaper.

https://mrbetamax.com/BetaSpeeds.htm

But this wasn't Sony's strength and VHS was consistently cheaper for longer movies.

[bsder]

I also seem to remember that Betamax made it far more difficult to get equipment and tapes in order to produce pornography.

That conceded a big chunk of early adopters to VHS.

[jjmarr]

I thought this was true for a while, but it seems to be a side effect of Betamax being more expensive in general.

The counterexamples that convinced me were Grok and Steam VR aren't taking significant marketshare from ChatGPT and Oculus despite having better support for adult content.

Originally, I thought this would kill Oculus given that's the most popular use of VR, but nope.

[bsder]

Porn tech usage is driven by solving some problem from the previous generation.

Videotape solved the "can't watch film porn at home" problem. Online payments and delivery solved the "need to risk going to the store to buy porn" problem.

What does VR porn solve over just watching standard porn on your monitor/TV?

And because of the resolution limitations, aren't VR headsets actually worse for watching porn than modern 4K monitors?

[jjmarr]

It's not immersive/interactive compared to the real thing.

Ironically, AI is solving this better than VR did. Many people are in relationships with AI girlfriends. Not many are in relationships with VR waifus.

[bsder]

Well, interactivity was solved by OnlyFans, no? And OnlyFans seems to butcher video quality pretty badly yet it doesn't seem to dissuade people very much.

[CodeWriter23]

Was quality even an issue at 480i?

[mjg59]

Yes - VHS had limited luma bandwidth that was about 50% of broadcast TV, and extremely limited chroma bandwidth (the equivalent of about 40 pixels per line). There's a reason laserdisc existed.

[kjs3]

Spot on...as I recall, you really couldn't tell the difference between VHS and Betamax unless you had a studio-grade CRT. Well...that's probably unfair...you could tell an difference, but not an enormous difference. It wasn't like going from 480i->1080p; not even to 720i. On our old analog TV there wasn't remotely enough 'wow' to justify the price difference and other limits, so dad took back the BM player and got a VHS.

[eggy]

Yes, but you're forgetting editing wasn't digital/digitized. You would copy from one tape to another, so a degradation issue. It's not the TV's capabilities, but if you started with higher quality you would get less overall degradation. I took film classes in TSOA at NYT back in 1982, and one class was film production and the other was lugging around a huge deck and camera in Betamax and then going back to a tape-to-tape transfer editing deck.

[kjs3]

Well, sure. My point is, as a consumer product, betamax did not deliver on its promise to the consumer that bought it. It's really not important at which stage of content production and distribution the promises got lost (and I think you might be underappreciating 'most people's TV set was pretty meh', especially after the components had some life on them). It was sold to my amateur audiophile dad (yes, we had a reel-to-reel) as 'world changing video', and it wasn't, certainly not at the price point. I think the obvious superiority at the content production phase is testified to by the crazy longevity of BM in that niche, but since we couldn't really see that in our house, we (and almost everyone) bought the VHS.