>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait f

>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense. I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.