VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.

But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.