When high definition television sets hit the market in the late 1990s, it was hard for consumers to justify the cost as there was little content beyond sports and nature documentaries. Having then just started my production company, I can attest to how difficult it was to create HD content. Corresponding cameras were expensive to begin with, plus productions required large amounts of digital storage space, which weren't widely available and prohibitively expensive.
In the case of HD, the trends leveled out. Today, we have cloud platforms designed to handle enormous files more securely than they were in the past and costs have lowered for everyone as the media became more mainstream.