Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Buying world-wide rights would be enormously more expensive than buying rights for a single country or region.
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Right.
And exercising those rights would take money the streaming co may not have. Note how Amazon bought LOVEFILM to get its PRIME video service into europe while Netflix had to build from scratch and took a couple years to get even a toehold; if they had world rights, they would be paying for rights they couldn't exercise for years and that wouldn't generate revenue for them or the IP owner.
Also, with regional licensing, the license (and customer relations) can go to a smaller, local player more attuned to the market who cares about their customers.
There are real business world differences between delivering ebooks worldwide and delivering video streams; there are matters of technical infrastructure build out, customer service, billing, and regulatory environment. All of which add cost and risk to running a global commercial video streaming service. And note that while Amazon took their core ebook operation global within months, they are still spending money and effort to build country-specific bookstores; they must see some significant value in localizing their operation.
Again, blanket equivalences are not a good way to look at these products; there are similarities but the differences are more important than the similarities.