Courtyard House: Is Xu Damao a childless man? Let me help.

Then, a week later, spicy strips, a snack that would be popular for decades in the future and still relevant at the time Ye Jianchuan traveled through time, officially went on sale.

Of course, having held back for a year, Ye Jianchuan couldn't just stop at making spicy strips. So, he quickly came up with another very popular snack: potato chips!

Well, potato chips aren't exactly a new thing anymore. They existed long before popcorn even appeared in the US.

However, the potato chip manufacturing process was relatively simple back then. The potato chips of that time were really just potato chips, which were products made by frying sliced ​​potatoes.

While these snacks are very satisfying, the texture of potato chips can sometimes vary depending on the quality of the potatoes.

Furthermore, since it's made by directly slicing potatoes and frying them, the size of the potato chips will naturally vary depending on the size of the potato. Even the same potato will have different sizes when cut in the middle and at the tip of the cutter.

In this way, when deep-frying, the smaller potato slices may have already burned, while the larger potato slices are just cooked through.

Chapter 372 Master Ye, the End of Pocket Money

Furthermore, potato chips made this way are usually seasoned after being deep-fried, so the seasoning basically only coats the surface of the chips. As a result, the flavor profile is actually quite limited.

The potato chips that Ye Jianchuan made today are an "advanced version" of potato chips. First, all the potatoes are mashed into mashed potatoes, and then the mashed potatoes are reshaped into "potato chips" of the same size using molds or similar tools, and then processed by frying or other methods to become the finished product.

In this way, all the potato chips will be the same size, so there's no need to consider issues like different cooking times during subsequent processing.

As for the seasoning issue, it was also easily solved through this method. After all, once the potatoes were mashed into mashed potatoes, Ye Jianchuan could add various seasonings according to his own needs.

Ye Jianchuan can add any flavor that he can adjust when cooking to the mashed potatoes in a certain proportion.

In this way, when the mashed potatoes are re-pressed into potato chips, the chips themselves already have a certain flavor. Although some seasonings are still sprinkled on the outside, they are only used to enrich the taste. The real flavor is still from the potato chips themselves.

For this reason, Ye Jianchuan was able to create a wide variety of flavors for his potato chips, including the Orleans roasted chicken and cucumber flavors that he used to really like.

Because of the production process, it is not easy for other small factories to copy these different flavors of potato chips. As a result, after the potato chips were launched, they immediately became another popular snack across the country, following spicy strips.

Moreover, because other small workshops have not been able to replicate Ye Jianchuan's potato chips, although they were launched more than a month later than spicy strips, the revenue they bring is now almost the same as that of spicy strips.

Furthermore, the profits from potatoes will continue to remain very stable.

As for spicy strips, since replicating them isn't too difficult and the flavors vary from place to place, the spicy strips made by small workshops according to local tastes have successfully captured a significant portion of the market share that originally belonged to Master Ye.

However, there's nothing that can be done about it, since the protection of intellectual property rights in China is still quite limited at present.

Although the battery and related technology developed by Ye Jianchuan have gradually led to increased attention to intellectual property rights, this process still takes time.

Furthermore, even if improvements have already been made, the improved parts will definitely be genuine 'intellectual property' and real 'knowledge,' not something trivial like someone copying someone else's snack.

Regardless of the circumstances, thanks to these two "blockbuster" snacks, Master Ye has reversed the downward trend of the previous year and has instantly started to make a fortune in the snack market again.

Of course, Master Ye's snacks now have a new nickname: "Pocket Money Terminator." As the name suggests, most children end up spending all their pocket money on Master Ye's snacks! This also shows just how popular Master Ye's snacks are.

The profits from snacks are certainly not to be underestimated, but Ye Jianchuan's return this time is not just about making a fortune from snacks. In fact, Ye Jianchuan values ​​another 'epoch-making' product in the home appliance industry even more.

This is the VCD, which had a brief period of glory but was quickly eliminated by the market.

Speaking of VCDs, younger people may not even know what they are anymore, since they were only really popular for about a decade or two from the 1990s to the early 2000s.

After the Beijing Olympics, with the advent of the Internet age, a large number of film and television works that were originally distributed via VCDs moved directly to the Internet.

As a result, VCDs, or DVDs which are improved versions of VCDs, instantly became obsolete.

However, this was still not a problem for Ye Jianchuan, because he knew that in the first ten years or so after the VCD was introduced, it had become something that almost every household had.

Back then, if people wanted to watch a movie, they would often rent a DVD and watch it at home with family and friends.

For this reason, the business of renting CDs was ubiquitous at that time. This business continued until 05-06, when it gradually began to decline.

Although Ye Jianchuan could sense that his existence would bring the digital age to this world sooner, he was also certain of another thing: even if it arrived earlier, it wouldn't be by much.

After all, there are too many prerequisites for entering the digital age, and many of these are industries that Ye Jianchuan cannot intervene in at this stage, such as the Internet, which is still under the control of the US military.

Since that's the case, if we develop VCD, this convenient way of distributing video data, now, Ye Jianchuan guarantees that he will definitely be able to make a fortune.

Even if it remains popular for more than ten years, or even just makes money for five years, it would probably be enough for Ye Jianchuan to make a fortune.

So... after saying all that, what steps are needed to promote VCDs? Is it simply to put them on the market and sell them directly to consumers?

The answer is of course no. Although the technology for storing information on optical discs has been developed, reading the contents of an optical disc can still only be done on a computer.

Therefore, the optical disc technology required for VCDs, or rather, the process of burning various film and television works onto optical discs and then using them on VCD players, needs to gain widespread acceptance before it can be implemented.

Chapter 373 Making a fortune through VCDs!

To achieve this level of success, simply putting the finished product on the shelf for sale is definitely not an option.

However, Ye Jianchuan was not worried about this at all, because he already had a solution to this problem. It was actually very simple. He just needed to follow the path that VCD took to rise to fame in the original world, and the problem would be easily solved.

In the original world, VCDs were actually invented by people from our country. The person who invented it went to the United States to participate in the International Broadcasting and Television Technology Exhibition at that time, and then became well-known to many people.

Of course, before that, there is a very important background information, which is the formulation and publication of the standard algorithm by the International Organization for Standardization in the early 1990s.

This event marked the beginning of the rapid transformation of data compression technology into new products across various industries, thereby triggering a revolution in film and television technology and ushering modern home appliances into a new era of digital technology.

In other words, the specification and publication of this international standard algorithm by the International Organization for Standardization is the real reason why VCDs became so popular. Well, to put it simply, after this international standard was established, everyone used the same specification to burn discs.

With the help of such rules, VCD only needs to tell everyone that the machine can read the contents of the disc, and then the rest of the problems are naturally no longer problems.

Therefore, what Ye Jianchuan needs to do now is to promote this so-called international standardization organization standard algorithm as soon as possible, so that the formulation and publication of this algorithm can be brought forward.

For Ye Jianchuan, this wasn't actually a particularly difficult thing. There was nothing he could do; he wasn't short of money, and these kinds of things could really be solved as long as you had money.

Once the algorithm is released, Ye Jianchuan's next task is to apply for patents for all VCD-related technologies as soon as possible. This includes not just VCD technology, but all technologies related to the entire machine.

This is actually a lesson learned from the past. After all, the guy who created the first VCD player was also the one who put it into production and promoted it, but because he didn't apply for a patent for the whole machine, someone else got the credit.

In the end, others only needed to make some minor improvements to launch their own 'VCD player'. Under such competition, his space for survival as the first person was instantly and severely squeezed, which can be described as very tragic.

However, Ye Jianchuan was determined not to let such a thing happen to him, so for the next period of time, he devoted himself to the preparations for the project.

Domestic appliance manufacturers have been equipping themselves with VCD player production lines, while overseas promotional efforts and patent applications are also steadily progressing.

And so, by the end of 88, all the preparations were finally complete, and Ye Jianchuan immediately launched this VCD player, which was compatible with global standard optical discs, into the market.

The result speaks for itself: it caused a huge uproar not only in China but also in the Southeast Asian market.

As for the European and American markets, the sales of this player are actually quite considerable. However, due to some other factors, the number of usable discs is relatively small.

This also means that VCD players are far less popular in the European and American markets compared to their popularity in China and Southeast Asia.

This 'other factor' is actually the issue of copyright. In the period between the late 1980s and the turn of the millennium, the management of copyright was not particularly strict, whether in China or in Southeast Asian countries.

Therefore, after the advent of optical disc technology, many people directly chose to buy relatively cheap pirated discs. This was partly because pirated discs were cheaper, but also because of a more practical issue: there were some movies they simply couldn't buy legitimate copies of.

That's right. The current level of trade is actually much worse than it will be in the future, so it's very troublesome to spread many things, including genuine movie DVDs.

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These are usually produced and sold by film companies or production companies. However, since most films are only distributed locally or in surrounding areas at present, the legitimate DVDs produced are naturally also sold in those surrounding areas.

In this way, a film from Hong Kong, for example, might only be distributed in Southeast Asia and mainland China. As for Europe and America, even if you wanted to find an original DVD of this film, it would be extremely difficult.

Similarly, while some Western films can indeed leverage their strong theatrical distribution capabilities to be shown and screened in Southeast Asia and domestically, DVDs don't have as much 'logistical support'.

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So if you want to watch Hollywood blockbusters on VCD, you basically have to wait for these movies to be released locally, and then the pirate DVD sellers will record them and make pirated DVDs.

For this reason, most of the CDs circulating in Southeast Asia and China are actually pirated.

This method is indeed very effective in China and Southeast Asia. However, its impact on Ye Jianchuan is not actually that great. Although he has established his own film and television company, the emergence of pirated DVDs will indeed have a certain impact on the revenue of his film and television company.

However, the money earned from selling DVD players was hundreds of times more than the losses, so Ye Jianchuan didn't care about such a small loss at all. On the contrary, he hoped that Europe and America could also adopt this model.

Unfortunately, Europe and America are much stricter about copyright issues in the cultural and entertainment industry. So, if you want to sell pirated DVDs or similar products in Europe and America, you have to bear the risk of being caught and prosecuted.

Moreover, it's not just selling these pirated items that can lead to prosecution; buying and using them also carries the risk of legal action. This makes piracy less likely to spread in Europe and America.

Chapter 374 The Benefits of Charity After Making Money

As mentioned before, genuine DVDs, at least those from Southeast Asia and domestic films, generally don't consider the European and American markets, so their distribution to overseas markets is practically nonexistent.

This created a situation where there were no genuine copies and no pirated copies, so even if people in Europe and America owned VCD players, they didn't actually have many discs available.

However, this does not mean that Ye Jianchuan could not sell VCD players in Europe and America. In fact, Ye Jianchuan's VCD players still sold quite a few units in Europe and America, but the penetration rate was not as high as in Southeast Asia and China.

One of the most important reasons is that the number of original DVDs is relatively small. When a movie is released, there may not be many viewers, so the production company may not be very confident. Therefore, when producing DVDs after the movie leaves theaters, the number produced will be relatively small.

Sometimes, a movie might only sell 100,000 discs in Europe and America, but currently there are already millions of households in Europe and America that own VCD players. This means that many families will not be able to watch the movie at home.

Of course, these numbers are just one example. Even for those best-selling movies, the number of discs released is not actually that many. Even now, some families who own VCD players may still not be able to buy one and enjoy the 'convenience' that a VCD player brings.

Therefore, the demand from families who already own VCD players cannot be met, and naturally, a large portion of those who originally wanted to buy one will be deterred for these reasons.

Ye Jianchuan couldn't think of a good way to solve this problem, so the development of the European and American markets could only be left to them to develop on their own.

However, this won't have too much of an impact on Ye Jianchuan. Although he did earn less money, the amount he has earned so far is already 'very, very much'.

Ye Jianchuan didn't leave this money idle. With the help of this wave of "quick money," factories in various industries across the country successfully completed expansions and production line upgrades.

Ye Jianchuan's charitable work has not stopped. The construction speed of Hope Primary Schools is astonishing, and many remote areas have been successfully provided with a primary school.

As for the issue of teachers, Ye Jianchuan had a brief discussion with his superiors. Ultimately, Ye Jianchuan funded the establishment of a special teaching support fund by the Ministry of Education, allowing every teacher graduating from a normal university to apply for a year of teaching support at a Hope Primary School in a remote area.

During this year, in addition to subsidies from the local government, the Education Bureau's fund will also allocate some money as 'rewards' or 'subsidies' for them.

Although this method may seem like using money to lure people to teach in rural areas, which conflicts with the original intention of 'charity', it must be said that sometimes having more money is the only true measure of success.

In less than three months after the fund was established, the number of people applying to teach in rural areas had already exceeded the number in the previous two years.

In this way, the problem of insufficient teachers in Hope Primary Schools has been basically solved.

In addition to building Hope Primary Schools to help children in remote mountainous areas go to school, Ye Jianchuan also selected several locations to build some 'public welfare' sports stadiums.

The reason for putting it in quotes is that this claim of 'public welfare' is actually somewhat exaggerated.

Although the stadiums built by Ye Jianchuan are indeed open to the public free of charge, Ye Jianchuan not only had to pay for their construction himself, but also for their maintenance and management after completion.

It seems like Ye Jianchuan has lost a lot of money, but for him, the benefits actually outweigh the drawbacks.

On one hand, the land for Ye Jianchuan's stadium was free for the public, so the local government naturally offered its full support. This allowed Ye Jianchuan to obtain certain tax exemptions, and the land was also acquired by him at a relatively low price...