[toast0]

Blu-Ray may be a bigger leap in quality, but it's kind of DVD but better. DVD vs VHS gives repeatable high quality video and audio, no adjustment or cleaning, chapter seeking, mailability (which enabled netflix and others to offer a huge rent by mail catalog), durability in a reasonable size. Laserdisc had some or that, but the size was cumbersome and the capacity was too small.

Some DVDs are poorly mastered, and modern encodings are better than mpeg2 at the same bitrate, but 480p DVD should compare well to bandwidth limited 480p streaming.

[babypuncher]

That is fair. DVD was built to support the same analog video standards as VHS, so there was only so much that could feasibly be done to improve the picture quality. DVDs popularity was all about how much more convenient and feature-rich the experience was.