Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
Netflix is a great example of good branding and legal access from anywhere. They also know that lots of their cusomers use geo-location fakery and they really don't care. so I can flip between netflix UK, netflix USA, and netflix-anywhere-else with a couple of mouse clicks.
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Netflix don't care because they're are getting paid either way. However the rights holders care. They care because the content they provide is tied to rights deals that are geographic in nature. You can argue that that model is out of date but it's still the case. So the company with the rights to distribute a particular movie in the UK may be entirely different to the one in the US. It may ultimately be part of the same conglomerate, but not necessarily.
So Netflix has to at least pretend to care in order to sign the deals in the first place.
It's a bit like how the hardware manufacturers of DVD players used to have to pretend that they weren't building multi-region players whilst hiding the switch within an "engineering menu". They get paid either way once someone buys the player, but in order to build the player in the first place they had to sign up to be part of the DVDCA which involved agreeing to enforce region codes. In fact technically they still shouldn't be doing this but no-one's going to enforce the rules when DVD drm has been so thoroughly defeated and the market has largely moved on anyway.