I had a laserdisk player (it was the only format besides VHS you could get the Robotech saga on for a long time).
The disks degraded quickly and are no longer useable
It didn't have much support. Or advertising.
Sony burned me for a lot of money on that.
Not entirely true. Yes, some of the early LD titles from the late 70's and early 80's (and pretty much any Sony title made after 1990) have a problem know as disk rot. Same thing happens to Cd's (and I presume one day, maybe dvds and HDM) as well. the data layer of the disk is made of aluminum cover by a thin laquered layer. On some of these disks, the laquer slowly wears off in places, causing oxidation of the aluminum. You could see it by holding it up to the light and seeing little pin prick sized 'holes' in the disc. It came from poor manufacturing. I just recently last month sold my last LD player and discs, and out of all the discs I ever owned, I only had 2 or 3 that had any rot (they were sony titles).
It had quite a bit of support, actually. Pioneer was the biggest LD manufacturer and made players up untill 2003 or 2004. I think the last big US release was in 1999 and in Japan about 2004. It was quite big in Japan. In fact, they had a Hi def LD system called MUSE that had hi def optical media to the consumer in 1991, 15 years before HD-DVD/Blu ray.
I think LD's biggest downfall was the price. Players never were below $400. This was a big deal when you could get a VCR for $400 or less, and it could record. Plus, media was never priced to own, usually discs had MSRP's of $99 or more. But it gave us many innovations that really took off on dvd, like multi channel soundtracks (Dolby Digital and DTS were used for years on LD before DVD), extras, alternate audio tracks like comentaries, and for the most part, OAR was pretty much standard. Nothing looked better than watching LD thru a good line doubler/quadrupler and a awesome CRT projector!.