It is commonly believed that Betamax was the superior video recording technology, but was beaten by VHS due to better marketing and pornography. This is not true. Wikipedia does a good job of describing the history of the format war. In short, consumers cared more about cost and recording time than about video picture quality. To record a TV movie would require 2 expensive 1-hour Betamax tapes, or 1 cheaper VHS tape. Hollywood adopted VHS because they could rent movies on 1 tape. In fact, VHS quickly matched regular Betamax in quality anyway. Regardless, porn had little if any influence on the format war.
