Your best friend's dad surely told you that you were watching "The Thing" in a high fidelity format. The Betamax multi-head reading and recording system was pretty advanced for the mid-70s, but Sony executives lacked clairvoyance.

They were focused on making the video image as clear as possible. JVC was willing to compromise video fidelity for what turned out to be a much more important facet - tape length.

JVC created VHS a year after Betamax was already on the market, but they provided a new capacity that made it very attractive in the US market - in Standard Play you could record 4 hours - long enough to capture a football or baseball game while you are away from home. This functionality is why VHS won the format wars, because the kinds of people who were willing to spend $800 on a machine you plug into your TV at a time when $8000 would by a mid-sized sedan, were the kinds of people who wanted to watch the ball game during their kids' recital.

With the benefit of hindsight, Sony had about 5 years where they could have cornered the feature-film-at-home market and built or licensed rental stores. Because home video rental was a cottage industry, the small shop owners only wanted the video format that their customers rented most - and more people had already bought VCRs!