Hey Zoom Man,
Laserdisks harken back to the days of VHS and Betamax. The Laser Disks were far superior in terms of quality and picture resolution, even more so than beta, however the actual laser disks, which were about the size of a 33rpm record, did not have a large data capacity. As a result people had to quite literally take them out of the player and flip sides in the middle of a film, or for longer films, insert anywhere from one to four seperate disks, flipping the sides of each disk when the time came.
I think because of the of the cost of the players and the disks and the constant flipping and switching disks in order to view one movie, the medium became unpopular despite it's quality and mostly fell by the wayside. However, with the advent of the DVD, the medium as made the most modest of resurgences, in that people who are now accustomed to watching digital quality films find that some films which have never been released on DVD were in fact released on LaserDisk at one time. As a result some die hards will return to LaserDisk to watch certain films, even though by todays' standards, the quality is sub-par.
Hope that make some sense?!
