20 Declassified Facts About The Mission: Impossible Series
13. The Series Marked The End For Betamax
"This video format will self-destruct."
Before Hulu, before Netflix, the way to see films after they left movie screens was to rent or buy a videotape. Videotapes came in two formats: VHS and Sony's Betamax... and if you still have any videotapes today, they're probably in VHS.
Betamax, as "Betafans" will tell you, had crisper, clearer images than VHS, but it was more expensive and originally could only hold an hour of footage to VHS's two. Sony fixed the latter problem, but not in time to keep VHS from dominating the marketplace. By 1996, the year of Mission: Impossible's video release, the last holdouts in Japan and Brazil were switching over.
M:I was the last major studio film to bother with a Betamax release.