greed
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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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
So then marketing budgets could be focused on different areas at different times, meaning greater chance of getting higher in the charts
That and localisations generally taking time and studios 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
Edit: clarity
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.
Edit for correction: The PAL/NTSC divide has nothing to do with licensing.
Those are 2 different standards for producing colored TV video, which were developed independently and got implemented in different parts of the world. Before the switch to digital, the entire production chain for media had to match the standard of your TV set. So you couldn't play US DVDs on European players simply because they were incompatible technically.
Fun fact: The European standard played at 25 images per second, while American movie cameras recorded at 24. So every Hollywood movie you watched on a European TV was sped up very slightly. This wasn't noticeable in the image or with voices, but the corresponding pitch change could be detected in music if you had a keen ear and knew the original songs.
Your edited correction is the right answer.
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.