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Maybe this is a cultural thing? My girlfriend is Chinese and I've never seen her do a "call" that wasn't actually a video call on WeChat. Japan also has had video calling for much longer than it took Apple to popularize FaceTime over here in the West. They were also ahead on VoD, for long train rides, I suppose, due to mass transit being more popular.

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While テレビ電話 may have been a fad, in my 12 years in Japan I almost never used it, nor did anyone I know use it on a regular basis.

(Unrelated, I think LINE completely took over the whole "communication market" and now people are addicted to async conversations)

Related, the LINE app that everyone uses in Japan can do video calls too, and that's barely used.

Asia has long been ahead of the West in video formats, and audio. Most of those formats were made there, so it stands to reason. What is curious is why it took so long to get popular in the West.

What do you mean with "most of those formats were made there"? The only thing I can think of is early digital video camera codecs. Even when these were created, MPEG-1 and H.261 had been around for years.

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