An early competitor to the VHS format for home videocassettes. The VHS-Betamax wars were much like the DVD-DivX wars of today, and just as DivX lives on in the form of a useful video file compression scheme, Betamax lives on through the Betamax decision of 1984, which ruled that it is legal for home users to time shift television programming; that is, to preserve TV shows for the purpose of watching them later. Paved the way for TiVo and its ilk, which allow time-shifting with much less loss of quality; a recent article in Forbes magazine inveighed against TiVo-type systems, calling them illegal, despite the Betamax decision.
NB: Yes, yes, the discs and the codec are similar in name only. It was a comparison. Now leave me alone.