I’m quite younger so I wasn’t around that format war but depends on who you ask you get different responses.
It may have contributed to the failure of Betamax, but there several reasons for the failure of that format.
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It was expensive. From the cameras to the playback machines, even commercial distribution on Betamax tapes came with an expensive license and fee that VHS did not have.
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Betamax tapes (initially) were limited to 60 minutes. The VHS tapes were initially 120 or 180 minutes.
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Betamax machines and Betamax camcorders were much more bulky and heavier and more complicated to use than their VHS alternatives.
Despite its superior quality, Betamax came with a lot of drawbacks, all of which were the major contributors to its downfall. How much porn itself had to do with that, it’s probably not known, but it was not a major contributing factor.
Porn is probably a correlation with those other factors…
Also that quality was the only differentiation in the age of 480i seems a bit crazy to then try to get a licence fee out of it. I barely cared about the quality difference between VHS and DVD when it first came out until I got a better TV where I could actually see the difference, and I imagine the difference with beta max would be even smaller than that 😅
Edit: 480i, not 480p 😅
Back then, the TV and VHS picture quality was somewhere between 240p and 360p. Betamax was the first format available to consumers whose picture was 480p.
IIRC most TVs only supported 480i until DVDs came out
Most could go to 576p, but it was rare for that to be broadcasted in the United States. It was mostly a Europe thing. And even when it was a thing, it only went on for a year or two.
Oh yeah true, it would’ve been 576i in NZ, so maybe that’s why I didn’t notice as much image quality difference between VHS and DVD(aside from the noise when VHS tapes get old)
well, I’ve also noticed that HD downscaled to SD looks a lot better than native SD.
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