Why VHS Won:
It is true that VHS had some lucky breaks with big retaillers choosing to carry that format instead of Beta (although one of the biggest, Sears, went with Beta at first).
But the big factor was the cost of tape. My first VCR, a Sony Betamax, could tape for only two hours on one cassette, which cost $29.95 USD. A VHS machine could offer six hours of recording on one cassette, which was priced the same as Beta. Picture quality wasn't that great on VHS's six-hour mode, but people didn't care - they could tape three times as much as a Betamax owner for the same cost.
It was too bad. I, like everyone else who'd bought Beta, eventually switched over to VHS, but I always missed the picture quality of Beta - it was way better than VHS, surpassed only when DVD became available.
Obviously, tape prices came down - and Sony eventually got Beta's taping time up to five hours with some machine tweaks and a special extended-time cassette - but by that time, the damage was done. By '87, you could hardly find Beta stuff, and it got worse from there.
