I know nowadays that doesn’t matter as much due to most DVD players or disc drives being region free, but I recall the time when I was younger in the late 90’s to early 2000’s most discs were region locked based on where you bought a copy (basically the same as buying a Japanese N64 cartridge versus an US one) meaning they won’t work when in another country.
For instance: I’ve purchased the first 2 home alone movies in Japan during my trip back then when they’re re-released on DVD (encoded as NTSC) while I come from a country where most discs by default are PAL so they didn’t work on my normal DVD player, having to purchase a multi region DVD player just to watch them. (This was before streaming sites).
Licensing. The DVD publisher bought a license from the rights holder that allowed them to sell a movie on DVD.
That license was limited to sales in a specific market, so they put in a region codec to prevent sales in other markets.
That way the same movie could be sold for a lower price in markets where people wouldn’t be willing or able to pay as much.
Without the codec, you could just buy a DVD in a cheap market and re-sell it in a more expensive one, making a profit off the movie without the rights holder getting a cut.Your edited correction is the right answer.
A great way to see this now is region specific pricing in online stores:
Money and sales charts
Being top of a sales chart was a big deal a couple of decades ago as it usually meant a product got better placement on the shop shelves
Also marketing budgets can be focused on different areas at different times
And localisations taking time and not wanting to cannibalise sales of a local version with imports
Also regional pricing, they could sell more in poorer countries for lower prices, but they didn’t want to give up the greater amount they can ask for from richer countries
DVDs were released at different times in different countries or regions. Movie studios wanted to make sure they control those releases and you can’t just easily import and sell a bunch of DVDs from a region with an earlier release date.
Of course there were DVD players that let you switch regions infinitely (and eventually just play all regions) or some people who had a second player for another region, but those were, at least initially, outliers. To make the general public wait to buy DVDs from their region it worked.
Although, one could argue, it gave another advantage to piracy. Not only would a downloaded movie not threaten you with the FBI or make you sit through unskippable ads, they would be available as soon as their release in any one region, so you would have to wait (sometimes a lot) less.
greed
The other answers are missing out on the key reason: licensing.
Copyright law differs between regions, and so different groups need to be paid when the video is “sold” to a customer. Before the early 2000s, this was even more the case than it is today; the US hadn’t yet tied its own definition of copyright to all its trade agreements.
End result? Selling a US DVD in Japan would have been illegal; not because of the region restrictions but because the people who had to be paid to play it in that region hadn’t been paid so the DVD was effectively a bootleg.
Yeah but the main reason for all those copyright law differences comes down to “greed, money, and control” as the other replies explain.
