ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

9 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Market protection, in two words! The British distributor won't give you 50p for a film available earlier and cheaper on import.

You're right that it's an artificial barrier, but probably a tricky one to cross since so much work has been done to bake rights management into the format. In some countries they've even managed to bake attempts at reverse engineering/circumvention into law (John probably knows more about this than I do).

On the one hand, it's their material to licence and do with as they please, on the other hand, they are forcing legit customers to pirate sites in order to watch stuff they already bought, and that is clearly not a good introduction!

9 years, 3 months ago - Karel Bata

Indeed yes. If you can't access it in your territory you may as well pirate it! From a moral point of view: they've already made it impossible to get any revenue off you hence they're not losing out, so why not? It's stoopid. I'd rather buy, but they won't let me!

9 years, 3 months ago - Dan Selakovich

I have no solution, but this stuff drives me nuts. While each distributor is trying to protect their territory, they are only promoting piracy, in the end. Is Bluray even region specific? In other words, in the U.S. we have NTSC and France SECAM, for example. But those are old analog formats. It would seem that manufacturers would have to go an extra step in the digital world to make discs unplayable in different regions.

I think a lot of piracy could be reduced if people had a legitimate way to see films and TV shows... well, somewhat reduced. I can't help but think of the TV show "Hannibal" where 2-3 million Americans a week watched it from pirate sites, but it was available the next day for free on sites like Hulu. The show was cancelled because of ratings. Now if only those people had watched it from a legit source, they'd have another season to enjoy.

9 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

I'm inclined to agree, music industry already went through this and films really should have learned the lesson when they had the chance...

9 years, 3 months ago - Karel Bata

Well, I've just bought a blu ray coming from the US via Amazon advertised as encoded for that region, but it turns out to be region free. So perhaps many more are? How is one to know? So we have a situation where potential customers may not buy a blu ray thinking they wouldn't be able to play it, and opt instead to pirate, whereas in fact...

Stupid system. Who does it benefit?

BTW Dan. Never had a prob with DVDs from the US, so the NTSC thing isn't an issue. I think something in the TV/player system here switches over. Paddy will know I'm sure... Or John. (better than Googling! )

9 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

In the digital age, the NTSC/PAL/SECAM thing wasn't really a thing any more, but some DVD drives for laptops had a stupid region lock, you could change from region 1 to region 2 and back a maximum of 5 times, then the drive would commit itself forever (regardless of the fact that the host laptop didn't care).

In reality in the end, every £20 DVD player (player as well as drive) was cheaper to manufacture as easily region unlocked and capable of playing back multiple technical formats - it was just cheaper for the factories in China to make 50 Million identical devices than mess about with regional hardware.