>porn played a big role here Beta had porn. Furthermore, that's not how home video worked. VHS and Beta were sold on their TV recording capabilities, not thei

>porn played a big role here Beta had porn. Furthermore, that's not how home video worked. VHS and Beta were sold on their TV recording capabilities, not their home video libraries. Home video was supposed to be handled by disc formats (Laserdisc, CED, VHD, etc); selling movies on $100-ish tapes was prohibitively expensive compared to ~$15 discs. Eventually this was worked around with video rental shops and falling prices of VHS tape, but a consequence of this is that neither Sony nor JVC were licensing content for distribution on their tapes. Remember, you could record whatever you wanted on the tape; that was the point.