When I was a kid, we had a record player. It could play records at speeds 16, 33, 45 and 78's. We used it to play all our old and new 45's , and our LP's, like Pink Floyd and Hendrix and CCR and ..well, everything. In the back shed, we also had an old gramophone, that we would use to play the stack of gramophone records that lived in the shed. Then George Lucas came around, and broke them all, saying the quality sucked, and he didnt think that was what the musician intended. He was like that, even as a kid. But that's another story...
Worst thing about a record was, you played it once, and it never sounded as good again. It got dust on it, it crackled, and went pop. If it got a bad enough scratch on it,the needle would just skate across the record, and you couldn't hear the track, no matter how many coins you taped to the head of the record arm. You could lift the needle up and plonk it down on the next track if you wanted to skip a particularly sucky track, and got some sense of satisfacion if you got it right between tracks the first time. You couldn't listen to a whole record without stopping your listening and flipping the record over, untill some bright spark thought of having a linear needle on each side of the record, but they were pretty late on the scene and weren't common.
Then came cassettes. You could play them ten times, and the sound was pretty much the same as the first time you listened to them. Sure, sometimes they would jam, and you would eject the tape to find half a mile of concertinaed tape spewing from the tape, but all was pretty good. You had a few problems, like having to rewind the tapes, but later you got systems like Auto Program Search System, that would let you skip to the next track or go back to the start of the last, or players that would auto play the other side of the tape without manually eject and flipping the tape over. You could also record other media, like records, and that created a whole new bunch of problems. After years of these, and major inprovement in the systems these were played these on, the lack of quality started to become apparent.
Then came CD's. They offered the advantages of whole album side with no breaks, no deteriotion in quality after endless playing, more resilient than anything that had come before, and smaller and lighter than a brick. Many people threw out all the records and cassettes they ever owned, and their players, and never looked back. Systems got cheaper because everyone owned one. All was good in the world of audio that you could play at home.
Now I'm too drunk to fill in the rest...but ..short version...the video format wars happened, the lesser man won, and we all had video at home. People worked towrds getting the equiv of CD for video, and we got laserdisk. It was too expensive for your average punter, and besides quality, most releases offered very little extra over a vhs tape. Later, we got DVD. With DVD we got alternate audio tracks, extras and docos and trailers and all sorts of crap on disks, plus we got instant access and no lack of quality from a tape dragging across some video heads. We got reasonable, affordable priced disks. People that never considered owning libraries of videos soon had more DVD than they could watch in a week. People have DVD, and don't give a damn about the slight upgrade that Blu-Ray or HD-DVD give in picture quality, because it offers nothing else.
Untill players can play both formats, and the player price comes down, and there is some groundbreaking release that people just have to have, people will not adopt the new video format beyond a few geeks with sacks of money to burn. I won't, and I have 20 feet of DVD's on my shelf, and have previously left a record, cassette, and video collection behind as I upgraded to whatever had a real advantage over what I owned before.
However, if there was a deluxe SW collection, with theatrical versions and The Masters Vision versions of each of the films, and a bunch of disks loaded with extras and all only available on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, then I would seriously consider getting a player for that particular format. I'm sure GL knows his stuff could swing sales for one format or the other. Must be fun to play God.