I'd love for this to be a whole video made by someone that can make quality videos about such subjects, but you can't in good faith drag it out for 10 minutes. So here, I'm going to tell you about it before it's too late.
Laser Link is, simply, an IR transmitter that can transmit full video and audio built into some handycams. It also requires a receiver hooked up to the TV, which is a small unit with it's own power supply. The signal is probably unmodulated RF, but I don't have the knowledge or equipment to find out. It's pretty dang neat, it's Wireless Video, but it mostly just works. You press the button, point the camera at the receiver and the video shows up. It's composite only, and the later "Super Laser Link" supposedly just has improved range, no S-Video feature. It looks fine enough honestly, it looks like composite but if you have it hooked up to an honest to Bob CRT TV and playing back camcorder footage, you're not going to notice it.
Why do this? Well, Video8/Hi8 never really took off as a video standard for standalone VCRs, so the vast majority of people would have to hook their camcorder up to the TV to play back videos from those formats. Docks were popular in the early 90s and with a remote that seems like a perfectly suitable solution, but for whatever reason they had fallen out of use for most units (and never gave them a damn timer function!!) by the mid 90s when Laser Link was introduced. Why hook up a dock to your TV that could also have video inputs for recording video to the pretty good Video8/Hi8 standards when you could have a fancy wireless receiver that can only output video?
That's a bit harsh, Laser Link is really cool but it works a bit too well to be interesting enough to become cOnTenT. Honestly I think it would be work to even stretch out a whole "Why didn't Sony make Video8 usable as a VCR standard without buying a whole VCR!?" video 10 minutes without a ton of filler or sidetracking. The good news is, you can pick up Laser Link receivers all day for $20 shipped or so on the electronic bay if you've got a compatible camcorder to go with. If you have a compatible Sony TV, you may even be able to get the Laser Link button on your camcorder to turn on the TV and swap the video input for you too! Very fancy stuff.