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Comment by grahamlee | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the extra features on DVD were originally part of the marketing benefits driving people to adopt the format because the studios preferred it to VHS because of CSS and region-locking. Then they found they had painted themselves into a corner making all these extra features that people came to expect, until finally streaming let them get back to “just the movie”.

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Features I don't want on DVD and much prefer streaming

* Adverts (especially the anti piracy "you wouldn't steel a car" ones)

* Logos

* Menus

It can take nearly a minute to go from the disk going in to the film starting.

It was a good investment to get a modded player that ignored UOP and let you easily skip stuff. As for menus, most DVD remote controls had a button to directly start the movie without having to figure out the menu.

Studios were making special features before DVD with LD. Not to the same extent, of course, but it wasn't a new thing by the time DVD came around.

VHS were dubbed… no need to do region locking.

Some VHS were dubbed.

Many VHS were subbed instead. Sometimes two versions of a popular film were released, one dubbed and one with baked-in subs. This did limit the desire to copy between regions a bit, though not as much as you might think given how many people speak one of a few languages as a second language.

I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.

Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.

It makes no difference. The question is if a Greek customer would buy a subbed movie from Lithuania for example.

Only if trying to learn the language of Lithuania, or is an immigrant from Lithuania. I'm not sure how common those are, I expect the total market is around 10... This is a real problem for the language learning community - they are too small for the studios to worry about, but the studios are making a lot of content that would be very useful for learning if only someone could get it.

>or Poland, almost everything was dubbed

Animated films were usually dubbed, everything else was narrated by one monotone voice.

Still counts as dubbed for the purpose here of not being worth anything in a different country.

Region locking was more that US videos were 60hz ntsc and most of the rest of world was 50hz pal, and multi-region hardware was fairly rare

Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content

Region locking stops (or is designed to stop) someone, for example, in the USA buying a DVD sold in the UK market. The localization of the product on sale isn't relevant to the decision not to sell the product.

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