I guess it depends on how much of a success you consider Laserdisc to be.  It wasn&#x27;t a blowout success like DVD, but it was a healthy niche.<p>I got the strong impression that DVDs were sell-through, a market I think Disney pioneered.  So maybe video rental wasn&#x27;t so important for DVDs, but I don&#x27;t know.<p>You are of course right that recording was a killer app for VHS, lots of time shifting ... although, hasn&#x27;t VHS died without most people replacing it with recording to hard disks?  I&#x27;m not sure TiVo got big enough, but I don&#x27;t know.<p>As brudgers points out in his reply in this subthread, recording got big enough to worry the content holders such that they imposed DRM on DVDs and Blu-ray, but it&#x27;s not clear their fears are realistic.  Certainly the cracking of DVD DRM didn&#x27;t stop production of them.