VHS was better than Betamax
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.
Handwaving 