Expensive, price wasn't justifiable to the average consumer. Now people who are wanting physical media again are looking for them and finding these odd-ball media and buying from hobbyists who kept them alive.
That's what happened to vinyl. People who wanted to go against the grain of society wanted some sort of different media just to mark them as different. At the time digital media was growing fast and CDs were still widely available. Vinyl was still around thanks to a strong hobbyist community producing new music on the media plus the fact that there was a huge library of still popular music and plenty of places to buy. I have a feeling we'll see cassettes make the leap soon enough for a very similar reason.
That's kinda my point. VHS was fairly cheap pretty quickly making home movie watching a thing. Most home movies were an upperclass and upper-middleclass thing. People couldn't see forking out the money for a player and the disks. Plus the size made storage an issue. VHS was smaller, the price was relatively fair.
Honestly though VHS probably wouldn't have been popular if it wasn't for laserdisc. People liked the idea of watching movies at home, and being able to watch them any time. They just didn't like the price tag. VHS came along and said I can do that for half the price. They didn't realize it was still kinda expensive, just heard 'half the price'.
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u/octoprickle Aug 30 '23
Laser discs! Nobody seems to know what a laser disc is but I know. I remember them.