A few years ago I found some information which I thought was interesting showing how the demand for laserdisc hardware and titles declined in the last few years of the format's life:

U.S. Laserdisc Hardware Demand
1997 35,000
1998 25,000
1999 20,000
2000 5,000
2001 -

U.S. Laserdisc Title Demand
1997 8 million
1998 5.6 million
1999 4.0 million
2000 3.5 million
2001 1.0 million

This info came from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-20796873.html

I don't know how accurate this is but I suspect it is not a mile out. If so then it not hard to see why it became uneconomic to continue.

Some folks on this site have indicated that current demand for players might only be 1000 players worldwide. Given the figures above that might actually be optimistic, although I have to say that if new players were being manufactured I would definitely be willing to buy multiple machines.

Also was the sudden sharp drop in demand not simply brought about by lack of supply? I mean you can't buy players and titles if only a handful are being produced. All of the hardware manufacturers except Pioneer pulled the plug on the format very quickly and the same seems to be true for titles. The format was never really easily available even in its heyday and when you restrict the availability to pre-orders only then sales will drop like a stone.

With the laserdisc numbers it would be good to consider the sales of DVD players. Part of the drop is the hype for the new hot product. As everyone talks DVD and waits to buy a new DVD player, sales of laserdisc players will drop. Add the studios reducing the number of new releases, and dropping AC-3 and DTS and only releasing the last few in the US in Surround, its bound to drop. Another thing about sales. I was pre-ordering everything I could afford and I didn't get some titles even though I pre-ordered. In my mind, that says the factory had given up if they weren't even willing to press enough discs for customers that already committed to pay.

LD was an unusual format. The discs were really expensive and IMHO you had to have a good HQ home theater system to really get the benefits from the format. I remember seeing them demonstrated in places like Circuit City ... always thought the prices would come down and the format would go mainstream ... never happened. Never bought too many back then, I watched mostly rentals.

I actually thought about buying a CED machine at the time (they were cheaper than LDs) but I never pulled the trigger.

The fact that the format was so "out of reach economically" back then is one of the reasons that I probably enjoy it so much today. It just seems like your getting such a bargain ... if you forget about DVD & Blue Ray for couple of minutes ... back to reality.

Actually ... being a Vinyl LP collector for many years ... I'm glad that Laserdiscs are not very popular. IMHO, the "comeback" of vinyl has really killed the super deals on legacy inventory that used to be common many years ago.

The Laserdisc format will eventually fade away into oblivion but .... who cares? I'll spin one tonight and enjoy ... in the end that's all we are guaranteed in life anyway ... as George Carlin once said "Live everyday as if it were your last, because one day, you'll be right".

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" -- Tyler Durden, in Fight Club

"What do you want to do, live forever?" -- Valeria, in Conan the Barbarian

Naturally, if something is not on the shelves, people won't buy it, & sales will go down.

Honestly, I feel there was an enormous missed opportunity. There were high-definition film-to-video transfers being made in the early 1990s, although the quality was initially somewhat problematic, & Image supposedly experimented with having MUSE LDs pressed, which wasn't significantly more expensive. The "pilot tone" recording system was designed to allow for building cheap consumer Hi-Vision players — you'd be surprised how little change would be required to turn a CLD-S104 into an HLD-S104! Pair that with an inexpensive decoder/converter along the lines of the HV-MD2, but perhaps with component downconversion outputs in addition to S-video & composite, & you can do everything DVD could for owners of standard & widescreen TVs, plus High Definition. In other words, one equipment buy of maybe $500 would future-proof you. Since the MUSE signal itself includes both 2-channel & 4-channel audio options, & the optional Redbook audio track on Hi-Vision LD could carry DTS just as easily as it did on standard LD, the home-theater audio end is covered too. And all this in 1994!

The plain fact, though, is that everybody involved with the retail end of video distribution liked DVD because it was smaller & lighter than either VHS or LD, keeping shipping costs down & allowing more titles to be packed into the same shelf space — not to mention that replication costs were lower.

Way back in the beginning Laserdiscs were the Same price as VHS. Anyone remember when the Tapes were 50 bucks or more. When Empire Strikes Back came out it was a 95 dollar video.

Oh yeah. In the early days of both formats, (laser & VHS), laser was way cheaper. A single disc movie was 24.95 and a VHS tape was at least over 50.00. Most discovision titles were less than 25 when most tapes were around 90.

honestly i think they should have stopped putting new technology into the format, they spent so much improving it with higher end technology drving the prices up, pioneer should have calmed down a little with the improvements and put their efforts into making the players cheaper, i mean god, those HLD's were being sold for like 3000$ right? look at vhs, vcrs eventually became so cheap to make that there not even dead today! u can still go into a store and get those dvd combo vcr's.. and they even sell blank tapes in some places.. if laserdisc players had come down in price, it would have lasted a few more years atleast

I disagree. Once DVD became mainstream, LD had few remaining advantages and several insurmountable disadvantages (12" disc size, 60-minutes per side maximum runtime, manufacturing complexity and costs, needing additional equipment for 5.1 audio playback, and relatively inferior video quality to name a few.)

By the time LDs were no longer being produced in the US in early 2000, DVD players were selling for only $200 or so. You didn't need to flip over the disc half-way through or use multiple DVDs for a movie over 2 hours. Dolby 5.1 audio didn't require a demodulator. Anamorphic video was part of the standard from the outset. Storage was much easier with 5" discs in Amaray cases, as you could put them in a bookshelf. Interactive menus allowed you to play more complex bonus features than any Laserdisc title. And the list goes on...

In short, the writing was on the wall, and nothing could change that.

I have always wondered if it would be possible for someone with the electrical know (certainly not me) how to upgrade existing LD players to allow some sort of muse playback, I know most players can be modded to add AC3. I assume you'd need a new laser with better focus and new PCBs. But I assume since no-one has a CLD-S104 modded to play the Back to the Future Trilogy on MUSE (I'm not cararte!) then it's not feasible for someone to do it as a home project.

In addition to the red-laser pickup, there are significant differences in the analog video circuitry, & a special decoder chip is required to extract the frame number & such information — not to mention the spindle motor has to be up to snuff. From a manufacturing standpoint, the differences aren't huge, but as a modification it would really be more of a complete rebuild. It might prove easier to make an NTSC player into a MUSE only machine than into a MUSE/NTSC version. There seem to be a lot of junked Sony HIL-C2EX units on the Japanese market, most of them with bad power supplies or pickups, & I think it would be easier to set up to rebuild those components than to turn non-MUSE players into MUSE machines.

I assumed it wouldn't be as simple as it sounded, otherwise we'd all have MUSE players.