Re: Same plant that later made rotting CDs?
At least in the US, the plant responsible for the "laser rot" problem in the early Eighties was the MCA Discovision plant in Fremont, California. I bought my first laserdisc player, a Pioneer VP1000, in 1981, and experienced about a 30% failure rate with discs from that plant. Yet in the same period, discs manufactured in Japan by Pioneer had zero problems.
Eventually, Pioneer, probably feeling that all those defective discs from the MCA plant were giving the format a bad name, bought the plant, sent in Japanese engineers and quality control inspectors, and within a year the defect rate was near zero.
Pioneer's players and high-quality discs saved the Laserdisc format from early failure, after MCA and Philips gave up on it. (The early Philips players were notoriously failure-prone.)
Although low-cost VCRs with "good enough" quality took over the mass market, laserdisc remained a collectors' format for many years. The "extras" we now take for granted on DVDs, such as directors' commentaries, deleted scenes, and "making of" documentaries, first appeared on laserdiscs from Criterion, who specialized (and still do) in highest-quality restorations and transfers.