Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The complexity of negotiating rights, almost without a doubt. Note, however, that Amazon do own "lovefilm.com" which operates in the UK and offers both download and streaming services.
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Correct on both counts.
It is not an Amazon issue, say "gamma testing" in the US before taking it international, but rather standard industry practice.
Video rental rights are negotiated country-by-country, much as book publishing rights.
As a rule, US rights are a lot easier to acquire and deploy than for other countries. And not just because of the content providers; video "broadcasting" is a protected and heavily regulated industry worldwide with a lot of hoops to jump through before deployment. Look at how hard it has been for XBOX Live video services to propagate or Sony's PSN equivalents.
In some cases, though, international projects turn out to face lower entry barriers than the US, most notably the XBOX IPTV efforts in the UK. The US equivalent efforts have been hampered by the CableCos tying the IPTV services to their cablecasting services and content suppliers' unwillingness to confront them.
Given that video streaming services are competitors to the CableCos on-demand video rentals, and that those same cablecos control broadband services in most markets, it is no surprise they would do everything legally allowed to hamper deployment of competitor services.
Netflix just happened to slip in, mostly unnoticed, before the CableCos noticed.
Hulu got in because it is owned by the content providers and the CableCos weren't abbout to mess with them *as a unit*.
Amazon taking Prime streaming standalone, even in the US, is a non-trivial effort. Even if they want to, they may not be able to deploy for a year or more. (Again, it's taken Microsoft three years to get even a skeleton IPTV offering in place and *they* have extensive Hollywood contacts going back to the last century.)