Why are VCDs so popular in Asia?
There are several key reasons. Southeast Asia is very humid and so VCDs will hold up better than VHS tapes. Also, they cost a lot less than tapes or DVDs. Due to the ease of copying and distributing VCDs, they quickly caught on with pirates as their favorite medium, and people quickly bought up cheap VCD copies of movies (pirate versions of movies are often available the same day — or even before — a movie premieres). The stand-alone players themselves are quite cheap, sometimes as low as US$60. Their smaller size fits in well with many Asian residences which are often smaller than their Western counterparts (and thus there is not as much of a need for replicating the “home theatre experience”). As for why they haven’t caught on in other parts of the world, it’s probably due to the confusion that would arise from them being packaged so similarly to music CDs, and the fact that most households already have a VCR and/or a DVD player (unlike in many parts in Asia, where VCRs and DVD pla
