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Originally Posted by crane3
Wonder under what terms the regional blocking being used in the distribution of DVDs fall under. Or maybe it is now alright for manufacturers to make "all region" blu-ray/dvd players?
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The initiative seems to be strictly intra-Europe; to aggregate all the small(ish) *digital* markets into something that might compare to NorthAm in market size. A parallel to the eurozone project, but to create scale and uniform pricing across the continent for digital media. Best example would be how Netflix and Lovefilm and competitors can't build a single streamer service for Europe but have to go country by country to sign up rights, often more than once for the same item. Netflix and Amazon and Apple and Microsoft and Sony can afford the time and cost but local startups can't.
Netflix as a startup was able to ramp up from zero to take on the big boys because the US is a 320m market with one set of rules and licenses so by the time they went international they had the resources to go country by country; Lovefilm was able to grow UK-wide on its own but had to join with Amazon to go beyond. EBooks shows a similar issue: only a multinational alliance of publishers has allowed Tolino to cross borders economically whereas most other local bookstores remain local in scope and size.
The issue starts with culture, feeds into patents and copyrights, and creates the licensing and contractual issues. It *should* be possible to work around the cultural issues but to get to a single digital market they are going to have to make copyright a EU right not a national right. Not an easy thing, thus the pussyfooting...
(And the leak.)
It's going to take years and years.
As for DVD regions, it shouldn't change a thing as it doesn't sound like they are looking to influence imports from outside Europe. Most of those are already single point licenses.