And this time the better format won right? Unlike Betamax which I hadn’t realised was actually invented 2 years before VHS and it’s fizzle-out was basically because of Sony patents.
Kinda...
The story (of Betamax) is a bit more complicated than that, the main reason of why it failed is that Sony did not understand the market where it was selling.
Also, the thing about Betamax having superior quality is a bit overblown, while Betamax at speed 1 (or A, I don't remember what it was called) DID have better quality, nobody used it! (and Sony discontinued quite quickly, favouring speed 2 and 3) since the recording time was so low.
(also the professional Betamax format is a completely different beast from the consumer one, at some point it switched to being digital)
Sony have always made strange decisions surrounding storage. Not selling Minidisc as a floppy drive successor, when the competition was gigantic ZIP discs, was a biggie. (I am aware of the NetMD etc, I had one)
Betamax was behind VHS in a critical metric: Original Betamax tapes could only fit an hour of recorded TV, whereas the original VHS tapes could do two hours. This mean that a single VHS tape could fit a whole TV movie, for example, or a whole sports game, whereas Betamax could not. Recording off TV was a major use case for home videotapes in the era before the movie rental market existed, to the point Sony and Universal fought all the way to the Supreme Court to decide the legality of time-shifting, so VHS having double the capacity with identical or nearly-identical picture quality pretty well decided the market.
I don't know about that last bit, go to Walmart and they have most everything new and current on Blu-Ray. Plus the less-compressed video beats the pants off of streaming.
Tons and tons of Movies and TV shows are streaming-only releases nowadays.
Also, a bunch of old movies get restored in HD and released on streaming services only. First example that comes to mind is the classic 1993 comedy Look Who's Talking Now.
Adding insult to injury, a bunch of old movies get remastered physical releases... on DVD only. That's right. SD content encoded with a 30 year old codec.
So if I want to watch a movie from my childhood in HD, more often than not my only legal course of action is to subscribe to a streaming service.
In terms of things that appear in theaters. I don't expect to see Netflix exclusives on the aisles.
And the market for discs isn't what it used to be. The long tail seems nonexistent now, it's a shame old remasters aren't coming through it any more. The last one I bought was the Star Trek TNG remaster, which was on blu-ray (and looked fantastic)
HD-DVD supported H.264 and VC-1 (and MPEG2). Initially there were plenty of VC-1 and MPEG2 releases on Blu-ray as well. HD-DVD simply died before the universal shift to H.264. There was however a difference in max. bitrate (~40 Mbit/s for Blu-ray, ~30 Mbit/s for HD-DVD)
The differences between the two standard were more interesting when it came to sound formats. HD-DVD had mandatory support for Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD (allowing the audio on a disc to use these without a fallback). Blu-ray on the other hand supported a higher max. bitrate for DTS-HD Master Audio.
