Cheap, digital and convenient, VCDs seemed a winner.
The only winners are the pirates, because all these devices can play VCDs.
Piracy has mushroomed with the spread of DVDs and VCDs, and as cable television has penetrated more than 40m homes.
"At the end of the last century," she said, "a lot of foreign art films came to China as pirated VCDs.
Those who can afford to are buying DVD machines; poorer consumers are settling for SVCDs; and the poorest of all are picking up VCDs for a song.
In China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and much of South-East Asia, however, VCDs lived on, outselling VCRs or any other kind of video player.
In Nigeria, an estimated 5 to 10 illegal VCDs are sold for every legitimate one, and the police make no serious effort to deter the trade.
Despite government and Islamic censorship, all sorts of arts and information are accessible through the Internet, as well as video compact discs (VCDs) and digital videodiscs (DVDs).
Six years later, production had crashed to just 40 films a year and not even the local triad gangs could prevent their own films from being pirated: there were bootlegs VCDs on sale everywhere of Casino, a gangster pic about and financed by the notorious Macau hoodlum, "Broken Tooth" Koi.
In the mill How profits wriggle through the net Data mining The fuel-cell car accelerates VCDs killed the kung fu star City of the dead The law and the profits ReprintsIt is easy to see why the database market has begun to matter to Microsoft.
I call these expressions View on Content Devices or VCDs.
