*bump*
To be fair, laserdisc began around 1978, in its rather primitive form as 'DiscoVision'. Of note: The first title was Jaws.
That eventually morphed into the double-sided laserdisc in the early 1980s, which became the only choice for the home theater enthusiast (remembering that home theater was itself a niche market for middle-aged guys with way too much money to spend).
Laserdiscs were in production in the U.S. until 2000, and in Japan until 2001. Star Wars Episode 1 was released on LD before it ever showed up on DVD.
And laserdiscs were still produced for industrial use for a short time after that, as they were used as media storage for computer systems for years.
So that 'couple of years' was about 30.
As for Blu-Ray having legs: It remains to be seen. The 3 challenges that prevent downloadable media from gaining momentum at this point are;
1. Storage space - The lesser of the three challenges. Storage space is increasing exponentially for hard drives. A BD disc holds 50 GB of information, so even an iPod-type device would have to enter the race with at least a couple of terabytes.
2. Copyright - Once things get downloadey, the suits freak out. There would be a lot of lawyering happening.
3. Bandwidth - This is the biggest challenge. Downloading a 50 GB file takes a long time and eats up loads of bandwidth. No consumer wants to buy a new movie but have to wait while their computer spends 2 days downloading it.
To sum up: I'm not a betting man, but my call is BD discs will be a slowly growing market for the next few years. Once something like Star Wars hits BD it'll jump in popularity, but not to the extent of what we've seen with DVD.
If the issues I listed above get resolved and movie downloads become plausible (in the sense that you have a portable player and can access all the same types of features as you do with a traditional DVD player), then expect BD to die a quick death. Until then expect it to very slowly make its way to becoming the standard.
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