People like to tell the story of how VHS beat Betamax because adult film studios backed VHS. It’s a clutch-your-pearls story that says nothing about why these multi-million-dollar businesses picked one format over the other. The real story is that while Betamax tapes had better resolution and fidelity, VHS was cheaper, offered longer recordings, and, most importantly, was the more open format. Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware ...