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Khuutra on 21 March 2009
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Ascended_Saiyan3 said:
Khuutra said:

DVD wasn't the first potential successor to VHS. Remember? LaserDisc was. It was supported by videophils too. It still crashed and burned.

Betamax was the choice of video and audiophiles for its superior sound and image quality. VHS curb-stomped it anyway because Joe Average decided it was easier to deal with VHS' tracking and non-tape-eating playerrs.

DVD Audio was the choice of audiophiles as the successor to the CD. Never got off the ground because right when it got to the point where it could have, people discovered MP3s, a decidedly inferior but much easier to use, cheaper, and smaller format.

I expect Blu-Ray will win over DVD in the future. It's inevitable at this point. If you think I'm arguing otherwise, you are missing my point spectacularly. The market shift is already happening. But if you think it's because "videophile" is necessarily synonymous with "early adopter", you are forgetting the burning corpses of every "superior" medium which Joe Average left smoldering in his wake, uncared for and largely unnoticed.

No.  Laserdisc came out in the late 70's (along with Betamax and VHS).  It NEVER reached more than 1 or 2% marketshare (and that was mainly in the US).  IT was a niche product.  You don't seem to know it's true, because you haven't done the research.  I have.  Packaged movie and music formats have been  been decided that way since the beginning.  It won't stop now just because YOU don't know this to be true.

I see you'e deciding to latch on to one particular point here - but was not LaserDisc the point of choice for true videophiles?

Was not Audio DVDs the choice for true audiophiles?

Video philes and audio philes are necessarily people who seek the highest quality at any given time. They are also extremely niche and do not decide the courses off these things. You can claim all you want, but the success of any given media generation is reliant on the average consumer, not the niche that can spend thousands on hardware nobody else feels they need.

Again: it's why we're all listening to MP3s, and why the originl portable radio was the biggest thing since cheese.