Vinyl is a niche / hipster resurgence. The recent resurgence doesn't even begin to compare with the growth of VHS / CD / DVD in their prime. All three were among the fastest / largest consumer appliance adoptions in history. And vinyl players are much simpler / smaller than laserdisc players. And urning over a vinyl while smoking pot and drinking craft beer is less disruptive than having to do that while watching Jaws.
Pricing doesn't happen in a vacuum. If more people perceived Laserdisc as superior to VHS, there would have been more first adopters, and then second adopters, and then the Laserdisc manufacturers would have more economies of scale and capital to invest in R&D to develop cheaper players. Original video cassette players were also very expensive, but as people started to see the paradigm shift / mass consumer appeal, more competitors entered the market, more capital invested in factories, economies of scale, etc.
Actually it does if you are the only copywrite holder, the barrier to entry was insanely high. I think I was making minimum wage of $2.80 then. Where could I get $850 for one movie? If they had taken a hit on the production and not tried to recoup all the R&D right off the bat they would have taken the vhs movie market. The quality was that far superior. Do you even remember watching one for the first time or were you not even there?
Quality in terms of mass consumer adoption is a subjective matter. While Laserdisc may have had better image / sound quality, it turns out the qualities that were more compelling were: multi-function (time-shifting TV, ability to play recorded home videos with also originally expensive VHS cameras); lower cost of production (niche videos and PORN!); and relative durability. Cost followed these attributes.
None of this is true and VHS cameras were huge and too expensive for most.
When music companies were getting killed by the ipod and other digital offerings, they also tried the "quality" argument. They tried to point out that CDs were better quality than most digital offerings, and there was a brief attempt at "HD Audio." But it turned out, the quality that mattered this time was cheapness and ubiquitous access. The FLAC guys remained a niche.
Thanks for the apples vs oranges argument.
PS - Re. the Sony patent I cited, that one didn't hurt them. Together with Philips and other players, they created a patent licensing consortium where they bundled all the patents that were "essential" for CD production into a single offering that was available to any party who wanted to make CDs for a fixed cost, part of the "red book" standard. So there is also a legal / cooperative aspect to why CDs and then DVDs became the global standard.
Of course it hurt them, are you really arguing that because they managed to get money in the future from patents is akin to owning the entire movie market of the time?
PPS - Seriously, don't dismiss the impact of porn. The high capital costs to manufacture laserdiscs meant manufacturing was centralized among large companies. Those companies didn't want to make dirty filthy porn movies. But the ease of duplicating VHS cassettes meant smaller companies could easily enter the VHS porn market. Porn is to media as drugs / illegal activities are to crypto. Aha - I managed to turn the conversation back to Monero!
I did not dismiss it, I never addressed it as it is not relevant. Porn will be released on whatever media the masses are using.
I'm getting sick of this argument, my time is worth more to me than this is worth. If you don't agree with my veiws then that is fine. Just know you have not and cannot change mine on this subject.
BTW OS2 was far superior to windows and lost do to IBM overpricing at launch as well.
