Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
There are a lot of reasons. Originally Beta tapes could only hold an hours worth of content (a big deal for home video). A big one was that from the get go JVC licensed VHS to anyone and thus there was a lot of competition on price where Sony kept Beta to themselves for years (they were the only manufacturer of tapes for a decade). These were luxury items for many people when they first came out and price became a factor rather quickly. Basically Beta was better in all respects (video quality, sound quality, stability) except the ones that were most important to mass consumers (price, availability of movies).
Beta as a format though was more successful in professional environments and is still in use for certain things where as VHS is all but dead.
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The recording time issue is the one that made the most difference.
Beta video quality was nominally better but a bit of a moot point when it turned out most people used their VCRs for time shifting of TV shows. At that point the VHS story of 2-4-6-8 hours recording time took over. Back in those days, being able to record a week's worth of a daytime soap on a single cartridge was justification enough for many. (For others, recording an evening or two of Prime Time or late night for Ad-less viewing did the trick.)
Those were all applications where capacity trumped "quality".
As to the Fire Phone itself, this explains a lot about both its failure and Amazon walking away from the Android smartphone business:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/premium...tag=TRE17cfd61