VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

Were bootlegs popular?

The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.

I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...

TFA

Bootlegging of everything is a huge business.

Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.

In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.

* And yes, that example is totally serious.

Very popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks

Bootlegging was massive in Malaysia. Whole floors of some of the high-rise malls in Johor Bahru were VCD shops.

My friend that lived in Iran said you basically would have a guy that goes around and basically opens his trunk and offers bootlegs.

Sometimes they’d disappear for a while and you’d have to work with your existing collection or find a new guy.

But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.

Rainbow Centre in Karachi was a highlight of my childhood.

In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.

Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!

same in Mexico. i remember buying a ton of nu-metal CDs from street vendors on vacation as a kid.

Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.

> VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off

I think that made the tapes read-only.

VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision (at least in Canada).

Yeah, some of the best places to get bootlegs even into the 2000s were swap meets and other small businesses. It wasn’t until decently later (and even then) that torrents and trackers would have a similar breadth. Everything had the BIG releases, but the swap meets had also sorts of strange things you’d never heard of.