Saw a reference to the VHS/Betamax war and said it was just price vs quality. Not really. That was a factor- video quality on Betamax was superior, but VHS had longer playback even on the earliest players and tapes. That's a significant technical advantage if you want to put, say, an entire feature length movie on one tape. Later versions of the Beta standard did offer longer runtimes, but that also reduced the quality advantage. This was a significant factor that most retrospectives of the format war I think severely understate if they acknowledge it at all.