VHS vs Betamax
The cliché runs: pornography decides every format war. VHS beat Betamax because the adult industry chose VHS. The internet was built by porn. Every new medium is pioneered by smut and then gentrified by everyone else. It is repeated with the particular confidence people reserve for facts they have never checked, usually by men, usually at the third drink, usually in the tone of someone letting you in on the real story behind the official story.
Like most such claims it is a mixture of the true, the unfalsifiable and the flatly wrong, and it is worth separating the strands, because the wrong parts have been doing damage to clear thinking for forty years.
Start with the videotape, since it is the load-bearing example. The story is that Sony, in a fit of corporate prudishness, refused to license Betamax for adult content, the adult industry went to VHS, and consumers followed the pornography. It is a marvellous story. It has the shape of a parable — the puritan punished by the market — and it has the additional charm of implying that the real decisions are made by the disreputable. The trouble is that the format’s fate can be explained perfectly well without it. Betamax’s original cassettes ran for an hour; VHS ran for two, and two hours holds a feature film and, more importantly for the mass market, an American football game. JVC licensed aggressively and cheaply to a wide circle of manufacturers; Sony licensed narrowly and dearly. The machines were cheaper. The tapes were cheaper. The rental shops, which are what actually determined what people watched at home, stocked what they could get most of for the least money. Adult tapes were on both formats. They were on Betamax in quantity. The claim that Sony banned them is a claim in search of a document.
What is true — and interesting, and usually skipped over in the rush to the joke — is a set of much less cinematic facts. The French videotex system Minitel, distributed free to millions of households from the early 1980s, generated a substantial and famous proportion of its traffic and revenue from the messageries roses, the pink message services, which were essentially paid flirtation by terminal. Premium-rate telephony in Britain and America was built commercially on the back of chat lines. The early commercial web’s payment plumbing — recurring billing, chargeback management, the whole miserable apparatus of proving to a bank that a transaction is legitimate — was worked out first and most thoroughly by people selling access to pictures. Affiliate marketing, in the form we now recognise on every corner of the internet, was refined in the adult trade before it was respectable. Streaming video at scale, with adaptive bitrates and cheap delivery, was solved commercially by tube sites years before the arrival of prestige television made it a subject of polite conversation.
So the honest version is not “porn wins format wars”. It is something more specific and more useful. Sexual demand is unusually early, unusually price-insensitive at the margin, and unusually willing to tolerate a bad experience in exchange for access. People will squint at a postage-stamp video, wait four minutes for a JPEG to unfurl line by line down a fourteen-inch monitor, install unsigned software, hand a credit card to a company in a jurisdiction they cannot spell. This is why sexual users arrive first. It is not evidence that they decide who wins.
from Infinite Desire (2026)
