[gitmo]

What killed Beta was that you couldn't record an entire movie on it. VHS would let you and won out.

[Tribune7]

bump

[clyde asbury]

What killed Beta was that you couldn't record an entire movie on it. VHS would let you and won out.

[Fair warning - this post is OT by analogy only.]

I was too young to buy my own VCR at the time, but my parents bought a Pioneer Laser Disc while Beta was still big, circa 1980. Laser Disc was to be the next big thing, a friend of theirs suggested; Laser Discs were "superior" to tapes.

As a storage medium that's true, but you had to flip the discs halfway through a movie, like flipping a vinyl album. I'm sure that's why the technology wasn't successful then.

Laser discs came back in another form later, as DVDs.