DVD Players – Now play crystal clear movies.
It's difficult to imagine a time when not everyone had a laptop or a home computer that was able to play DVD movies or TV programs, but it wasn't that long ago those DVD players were the only way for many people on the go to be able to have their favorite program alongside their notebook. DVD players did particularly well for airplane travelers; that is, people going on airplanes needed something small and dedicated with enough battery power to keep things humming through the popcorn and a movie that could be as much as three hours long. The DVD player met the need for such divertissement. DVD players are now found in many other venues. One area that is particularly successful is the employee training market, where companies are producing DVD's to help train their employees on the use or sale of their products, and give their employees DVD players to allow them to study things at home, on the bus or train to work, or over the weekend.
As you can imagine, a free DVD player was quite an incentive for employees who had other uses for these devices when they had them at home or in the office. Free DVD players became popular for their other uses, as well as for meeting corporate training goals. Eventually, the portable DVD player became a perk for the employee who wanted to be able to demonstrate tangible appreciation for his or her work at home and alongside his or her employees at the workplace.
The Region-free DVD player is the latest in a series of products designed to appeal to the globe-trotting person who may pick up a DVD to see in Singapore and end up looking at it in the United States. The formats for viewing video in the pre-DVD days were different for each major region of the world. In Japan, for example, NTSC programs were unviewable by the locals. In Europe, PAL and SECAM standards made it difficult to watch a program from one European country to the next. In Germany, SECAM was the standard, while in France, PAL was the standard. These standards were developed at a time that each country protected its programming and its national champions who manufactured TV's and other electronic media.