+1. (With reservations, anyway.)
Laserdisc did have (far) less market penetration than VHS VCRs, but, well, wine has only about 1/6th the market share of beer in the US and no one calls wine a "failure", and Laserdisc legitimately held onto the "Videophile" niche for over 15 years. That said, perhaps with better marketing it *could* have done better although... I dunno.
I remember when I was a kid one of the top uses people had for their VCRs was the one "rich guy" with the deluxe cable subscription would record stuff off HBO and hand around tapes to those less fortunate. (And yes, that was technically illegal. Sort of. Maybe.) That was something you couldn't do with a Laserdisc player. One thing I think people tend to overlook today when passing judgement on these technologies was just how expensive they were back in the day. The first VCR my family bought was something like $500 in early-1980's money, which is the better part of $1,500 today. LaserDisc players actually weren't that much more expensive but you couldn't watch or trade pirated movies with them so for the vast majority of Americans who could barely afford one or the other (definitely *not* both) the VCR was the clear winner.
It probably didn't help that RCA dumped the CED SelectaVision system on the market right in time to screw with the public's perception of the "video-on-a-disc" concept. CED was a genuine lemon and a lot of people assumed the problems with it applied to LD as well.
Heh. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone out there actually still has a working CED player and some not-worn-out-yet discs. *That* would be a find.