Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
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.
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This whole topic of regional restrictions hinges on the fact that the regional content supplier only has the right to stream content in his region.
When I use his service in some other region, I'm still paying the copyright holder and also the original content supplier. The only one who loses out in this is the content supplier of the new location.
But, most of the times this kind of geo-spoofing happens for the following two reasons
- There is no content supplier for the specified content in the new region
- I'm a global traveller who is going to spend a short time in the new region
In the former case there is anyway no loss to anyone. In the latter, a traveller on a short trip is anyway not going to buy a subscription for that short time and it unfair to ask him to do so. So, although we can technically argue that there is a chance of revenue loss for some party, I personally don't view it so. If the user is forced to take a subscription in this new location for this short time, I would personally view it as a revenue loss for the customer.
One gray area where geo-spoofing might cause actual harm is when I have a legal content supplier for my area, who because of local rules and taxes charges more for the same content than a foreign content supplier, say Netflix. Now, in this case illegally (still a gray area
), acessing the content from Netflix, by geo-spoofing, is actually causing real harm to my local content supplier.
I'm not sure how to prevent this and in our connected world, I don't think it can be too. The only way would be for the Governments to ensure that their local content suppliers can stay competitive with the global ones. (Or follow China's way and create a great Internet Firewall
)