succeeded for JVC. For forty years JVC dominated the home market with its VHS, Super VHS and VHS-C formats, and collected billions in royalty payments. The video recording market was an unknown when VCRs first came on the market; as such, Sony and JVC were both developing technologies that were unproven. As a result of the desire to enter the marketplace faster, the firms both spent less time on research and development and tried to save money by picking a version of the technology they thought would do best without exploring the full gamut of options. Similar video-format-wars Following the videotape format war, VHS was dominant until the creation of DVD technology. The major electronics corporations agreed on a single standard for playback of pre-recorded material on DVDs. A minor skirmish arose over DIVX, but it died a quick death. Video 2000, a system developed by Grundig and Philips in 1979 was available for PAL and SECAM and distributed only in Europe, South Africa and Argentinia. A later format-war resulted from a failure to agree on a single standard for DVD's high-definition successor (HD DVD) in May 2005. This format war ended in victory for the Blu-ray Disc Association's Blu-ray Disc in February 2008. See also Betacam Comparison of high-definition optical disc formats De facto standard Dominant design High-definition optical disc format war Peep search, a picture search system pioneered with Betamax and available on most video formats since. Videocassette recorder Streaming war References External links The Great Format War of the early 1980s - Total Rewind The Rise and Fall of Beta by Marc Wielage & Rod Woodcock Why VHS was better than Betamax - Guardian Unlimited Business rivalries Format war Mass media rivalries 1970s in technology 1980s in technology VHS