VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

One of those factoids you often hear about Southeast Asia is that VCDs and Laserdiscs were more popular than VHS tapes. The cited reason is usually mould, on account of their tropical climates. But there was more to it. For starters, what are VCDs and Laserdiscs? One of them is an initialism, and the other one is a word that sometimes employs camelCase. Initialisms are distinct from acronyms, in that you don’t pronounce them as a word. Laser is an acronym, and ATM is an initialism. camelCased words are so-named because the uppercase letter midway through a word bears a resemblance to the named animal and its distinctive hump. I remember at UniSA I had a lecturer who insisted our variables and class definitions useCamelCase , and another lecturer insisted_on_underscores . Remembering which person wanted what was a constant struggle, especially when I’d have NetBeans open and I’d be working on both assignments simultaneously. NetBeans is also camelCase! Where was I going with this? Tapes in Singapore VHS tapes were everywhere when I was a kid in Australia. Much like the US, it was how our parents handled “time shifting”, which was a fancy term meaning “skip ads and watch stuff later”. My parents would receive care packages from recorded Australian TV when we moved to Singapore, at least until we got The Australia Network on cable. It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post. VHS was definitely used in Singapore. You could walk into Sim Lim Square or a Best Denki and get your tapes alongside cassettes for your Walkmans. They came in all the same formulations and lengths as what you get overseas. I had local friends who’s parents had walls of the stuff, much as mine did. I remember being fascinated by the carts with traditional Chinese spines from Taiwan, mixed in with handwritten notes about English shows. VHS tapes were also significantly cheaper than back in Australia, presumably in part because they were made locally, or at least geographically closer. Heck, I even saw Betamax tapes for sale, despite the heyday for the format predating when I lived there. Fun fact as those YouTubers say, Singapore was once the largest manufacturer of floppy disk drives! Not bad for a country smaller than most Australian farms. But I digress, again. Hot fuzz While VHS was used, it wasn’t as popular as optical formats. The factoid about mould is correct: Singapore’s tropical climate did cause mould issues on tapes. Tapes we imported from Australia would develop a nasty white fuzz that would appear behind those transparent reel windows. I don’t remember it ever causing issues during playback, though we had a tale from a family friend who played a tape that was so gummed up it jammed the machine. Yuck! This spooked my parents sufficiently that they’d consign any tapes exhibiting the fuzz to ewaste; I guess they didn’t think it was worth attempting to clean them. Curiously, tapes bought locally in Singapore didn’t exhibit the same moulding issues; or at least, to the same extent. I’m not sure if it was on account of them being physically newer, or maybe tape manufacturers updated their formulas to make them better resistant to mould growth. You can see an example of an Australian tape that was subjected to Singaporean humidity over many years. One day I’ll get around to cleaning this, if and when I figure out how to. Enter optical formats This does partly explain the popularity of optical formats over magnetic tape in Singapore, and in other affluent parts of Asia like Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. Laserdiscs were one of these formats, which were popular in video rental stores much as VHS was in the West. The Laserdisc you saw at the start of this post was an ex-rental, as you can see from this old Singapore government certificate: Wikipedia summarises this advantage, along with economic reasons for the format’s relative success: Laserdiscs were also popular alternatives to videocassettes among movie enthusiasts in the more affluent regions of South East Asia, such as Singapore, due to their high integration with the Japanese export market and the disc-based media’s superior longevity compared to videocassette, especially in the humid conditions endemic to that area of the world. There’s a “citation needed” link in the article, but this jibes with my experience. Singaporeans were becoming wealthy during this time, and they bought a lot of Japanese goods. The mighty (small) VCD While Laserdiscs were popular among videophiles and rental stores, their cost was still prohibitive for most people. Rather than going down the route of tape though, Video CDs became the dominant format in the 1990s for video distribution. VCDs, as Singaporeans universally referred to them, use a Rainbow Book standard alongside music CDs and CD-ROMs. This meant, unlike the analogue video on a Laserdisc, VCDs used the same underlying digital technology as audio CDs to translate pits on the surface of an optical disc into a digital signal. But how did they store video on a format designed originally only for audio? By compressing the ever-loving crap out of it! VCDs used MPEG1 at a tiny resolution, to the point where our pre-recorded VHS tapes were higher quality. That said though, VCDs offered several key advantages over Laserdiscs, and indeed over VHS tapes: They were small, easily transported, and less fragile than massive Laserdiscs, and had no moving parts compared to tape. They had a three-letter acronym, which everything in Singapore apparently needs. Sorry, OCBC. They could be played ad infinitum without wear, provided one stored them properly and didn’t scratch them. They could be pressed, duplicated, and burned en masse, and at a much cheaper cost than Laserdiscs or VHS. This last point was the other key driving factor to its success over VHS. Those of you who grew up or travelled around Southeast Asia in the 1990s would be well familiar with its “pirate CD” scene. I have vivid memories of buying computer parts at Sim Lim Square before hearing a siren and the deafening clattering of roller doors as the pirate CD stores shut them before a raid. As the Singaporean government clamped down on these distributors, they moved to Johor where Singaporeans could cross the Causeway and get a copy of the latest Andy Lau flick. Video CDs were, functionally, no different to a disc duplicator than a CD-ROM. They have a file system, video files, audio, and other metadata. They can be pressed or burned as any other CD would be, and in massive quantities. Put yourself in the shoes of a video watcher in the 1990s: why bother fussing around with recording from TV onto expensive VHS tape, when you could buy it on VCD for a few Singapore dollars, or Malaysian ringgit across the Tuas Second Link? The illicit trade was big, but legitimate VCDs were also available. Sembawang Music used to sell official VCDs of popular shows like my beloved Phua Chu Kang, and for very reasonable price. To this day I regret parting with these; I suspect watching them at that low resolution via an upscaler would hit this ang moh right in the nostalgic feels. The popularity of VCDs in Singapore endured well into the DVD era as a more affordable option, and was very popular with serialised, lower-budget TV that didn’t have the fancy surround sound or mastering that those DVD releases had. Clara’s folks still have piles of VCDs from Hong Kong as well, another place where they saw huge success for similar reasons. Conclusion VHS tapes were a thing in Singapore, and yes the climate played a part, but economics were just as big a factor… if not moreso. That went into far more detail than I expected, but it was fun thinking back to this old stuff.