Sony's Betamax was the better tape — and still lost the format war to VHS

Sony introduced Betamax in 1975, the first consumer videocassette format, and it was widely regarded as offering better picture quality than the rival VHS format that JVC launched shortly after. For a time, the two formats competed head to head in what became known as the videotape format war. Betamax was the technically superior product on the spec sheet.

But two things decided the war, and neither was picture quality. First, recording time: early Betamax tapes held only about 60 minutes, too short to record a movie or a football game, while VHS offered longer recording from the start. When Sony extended Beta to two hours, it had to reduce resolution, giving up its quality edge. Second, and more important, licensing: JVC licensed the VHS format broadly to many manufacturers, which drove competition, lowered prices and flooded the market with VHS machines. Sony kept Betamax more proprietary, limiting who could make it and how widely it spread.

The result was a classic network-effect victory. More VHS machines in homes meant more demand for VHS tapes; movie studios and rental stores bet on the format with the bigger installed base, which made VHS even more attractive to buyers. By the late 1980s the outcome was clear, and in 1988 Sony tacitly conceded defeat by adding VHS models to its own lineup. Sony kept making Betamax recorders until 2002 and cassettes until 2016, but the format war had been lost a decade and a half earlier.