I thought VHS won because early Beta could only fit 1 hour on a tape, which clearly isn't long enough for anything worth recording. The resulting head start meant that VHS was cheaper as it became a mass-market product, became the format of choice for pr0n, and that was that.
The success of consumer media formats is nearly always about the price and the available content, not the technical merits (or lack thereof) of the format. Sometimes people who should know better forget this: Case in point, the success of the film Avatar, from which the industry decided to learn that people wanted more 3D films, rather than more films about blue tree-hugging aliens with USB tentacles.