If the corporations can shop globally for the best place for production and for hiring people, why shouldn’t we have the right to shop globally for their products?
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Just so. You’ve heard of High Court / Low Court, where the wealthy and powerful get off scot free for crimes that would put us little people in jail for a long time. Investment fraud, lying to Congress, etc.
Apparently there’s also High Market / Low Market. Corporations can move jobs overseas at will. They can buy goods and materials overseas. They bribe/lobby to have trade in services included in all the hot new international trade agreements.
Consumers get the Low Market. Those who buy goods from second world countries and sell them in North America at second world prices, tend to find themselves dragged into court. DVDs come region-coded to keep the markets separate. Canadians are blocked from watching Daily Show clips linked to on many web sites. Canadians who pay for the American Netflix selection get declared thieves, while later this year the new Star Wars movie will be available on Netflix to Canadians but not Americans.
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I’m perfectly happy with Netflix’s current offerings for Canadians. I’ve gone digging through the US one occasionally, but for the most part haven’t bothered going through the hassle to use it since I rarely run out of stuff that I want to watch on the Canadian one. In particular, going through the hassle of getting my whole house’s internet connection going through my US VPN - since I watch Netflix on my phone, my iPad, my Xbox One, and my Tivo box, it’s non-trivial-or-impossible getting each one of those individually set up to go through the VPN, when for the most part there isn’t anything I want to watch on US Netflix that I can’t find elsewhere.
In Canada, Rogers and Bell both have streaming video services (Shomi and Crave, respectively). They end up fighting with each other, and Netflix, to buy the rights to stream specific content here in Canada. So yes, the content owners are swayed by $, but sometimes Netflix loses the bidding war.
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I’m not willing to give Bell or Rogers a single penny more in this life, so I’ll happily pay Netflix extra of they can wrangle the good content
That’s hilarious… do they know that The Pirate Bay doesn’t enforce any region blocking at all? It’s funny how the industries that peddle cultural information believe strongly in globalism, for themselves, but cannot stand when the consumers take part in their own globalism.
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So, what I’ve never seen is the xls that explains why region blocking is financially advantageous. Getting studios ready for launch? Sure! But why IP ranges for countries?
There has to be a reason, and I want a content exec to show me a pivot table 
It’s more funny that there are consumers who defend the corporations when they do the region blocks, and even chastise those who opt out.
People in, say, China typically don’t have as much money on average as Americans. Regional segregation of markets allows them to sell the same product at two different prices. Say $12 in the USA, and maybe $9 in China. This way they can charge the absolute maximum amount the market will bear for any socioeconomic region.
Which is utter bullshite. If they can make money selling it for $9 in China, they have no moral excuse for charging me more in the USA. If they want to globalize they have no business whining when I decide to take the globally better deal. And if they want to stop me from shopping, then I guess I won’t pay them anything at all and just take it instead.
If these knobgoblins had their way they’d segregate the market all the way down to the individual customer, while not allowing anyone to tell anyone else how much they paid.
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But the question I was getting at is why sell in the US at $12 and $NaN in china. This isn’t a question of market economics in a simple since. Especially when you get the NaN problem in Canada.
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Hm. I’m guessing that people think that monopolies are somehow intrinsically valuable? I mean, it works for patent trolls, and copyright trolls. So they think “why shouldn’t it work for distribution trolls?” Except I’ve never heard tell of anyone being sued (yet) for unauthorized distribution in the context of geographical restriction…
I know that SOP is every region has it’s own TV and radio distributors (stations and networks), and they buy up the rights for everything they think will make them money, but then don’t ever actually broadcast or release on media the shit they buy the rights to. Unless it’s domestic, or otherwise extremely popular. In the USA we got a whole American version of The Office, rather than getting the UK version. It would have probably been worth it to the networks to just keep The Office out of the US altogether, but NBC was able to capitalize on a re-imagining of it, instead. Lucky them. They made an absolute shitton of money.
It’s like they only understand half the patent trolling strategy. But fail to understand that distribution is way harder to track and fight without an established panopticon style infrastructure than patent trolling where (at least in the USA) the government does all the legwork and goes to bat for you.
I’m still interested in that XLS though too.
I think a lot of distribution failures are just mistakes, and assumptions. Corporations buy the rights thinking they’ll get around to distribution, but subtitling/redubing is very expensive and it turns out that it’s usually not worth the cost, but they feel it’s worth it just to keep the exclusivity. “If I can’t make money off of being a middleman, NOBODY CAN!”
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Something that came to mind when pondering this, was that I wonder if they believe they can only make money selling it for $9 in China if they sell it for $12 in the US. But that’s probably wrong, and it’s probably just a case of charging whatever the market can bear. I can’t really blame them for trying to maximize their profits… Well, I can, I guess, maybe what I really mean is I’m not surprised, in today’s business climate, that this is what they choose to do.
Again, this doesn’t really make sense in Canada, where subtitling/redubbing isn’t an issue (well, unless there’s some restrictions that they have to include French for the fucking Quebecers).
I, too, don’t understand the financial incentive behind avoiding a worldwide licensing strategy. I’m sure there’s some marketing/sales “science” (read: foolish assumptions that don’t apply in the internet streaming era) behind it.
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That’d be exclusive rights deals with companies that don’t have world-wide coverage. Many of them ending, but not soon enough.
Netflix has confirmed that Canada is its only market with streaming rights for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2016.
In the US, films with theatrical debuts in 2015 still fall under Disney’s deal with American premium cable channel Starz. Disney’s deal with Netflix US kicks in for movies debuting in 2016.
Americans wanting to stream The Force Awakens will have to use VPN tunnels to access Canadian Netflix.
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