But why was VHS supposed to be better?

The reason why VHS has won from BetaMAX was simply because of one thing: pr0n! The pr0n industry embraced the VHS technology because the tapes were fairly cheap. Because lots of pr0n was available on VHS, people bought a VHS recorder!

Simple network effects at play here: do NOT underestimate the power of pr0n, really!

-- JaWi

Every product that I've ever bought from SonicBlue has been malformed and returned to sender.

The technology sounds cool, but I'll probably wait until it's available from another vendor.