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Comment by guappa | Hacker News Reader

VHS were dubbed… no need to do region locking.

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

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.

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.

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.

Some VHS were dubbed.

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