Ohh, I didn't mean All of the time I meant alot of the time. My bad, I was playing loose with the verbage. 
AFA the Laser Tech it was only competing with tape when released and cdroms didn't come out till much later. they had ample opportunity to own the market but in their case they priced the majority out of the market. IIRC I was making $2.80 an hour and the machine was $800 and one movie was $50 which is just an insane amount for the time. I think they only had 4 movies on launch and Logans Run was the one I wanted.
AFA the Laser Tech it was only competing with tape when released and cdroms didn't come out till much later. they had ample opportunity to own the market but in their case they priced the majority out of the market. IIRC I was making $2.80 an hour and the machine was $800 and one movie was $50 which is just an insane amount for the time. I think they only had 4 movies on launch and Logans Run was the one I wanted.
Yep, and there was virtually no protective coating on the things, so the smallest scratch on the disc pretty much ensured the picture would lock up indefinitely at some point
We're on the same page. You're saying at any given point in time an inferior tech might be favored due to prohibitive cost or other limitations of its rival. I can agree with that.
For what it is worth, it wasn't a lack of protective coating that made laser discs less reliable than CDs or DVDs. In addition to gradual improvement of the technology, two key breakthroughs for CDs was that they were digital (Laserdiscs were analog) and also incorporated the Sony patented cross-interleaved ReedSolomon code for error detection and error correction. This meant small scratches no longer impacted the output.
Laserdisc providers didn't intentionally price themselves out of the market. They were cumbersome (large players, needed multiple sides / discs per movie, delicate discs); a one trick pony (as mentioned, can't record TV, home videos, porn); and had more centralized manufacturing (complicated mastering process and moulding of multilayer discs, vs. just buying a bunch of recorders and duplicating porn or other non-mainstream content). Their market was limited to videophiles. They never got enough widespread adoption to drive the costs down as happened with VCRs and later DVDs.
So I don't think you can simply say Laserdisc was "better technology" at the time. And if you want to move to the underlying technology of "recording data using bumps on a piece of plastic that is decoded by a laser reading reflectively" vs "recording data using magnetic storage", well, the laptop I use to listen to music and watch movies only has the latter technology, and my other laptop has neither!
But back to Monero - while I was typing this, nice little rally!