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DVD Zoning Challenged by UK Supermarket Chain
maroberts writes, "Britain's larget supermarket chain, Tesco, called on Warner Home Video to abandon zoning which inflates UK DVD prices, reports
The Independent. Apparently sales of Tesco's stock DVD player [Wharefdale DVD-750] skyrocketed after the UK's hi-fi press explained how to make the unit region-free. " Looks like the UK is tired of overpaying for movies.
First, choose your enemies wisely. Fighting some poor teenager from the frozen wastelands is easy. Fighting gigantic megacorps is hard. The DVD thought police are making dangerous enemies, enemies on their own turf (see, hackers (in the non-perjorative sense) are not going to fight the battle on their turf. Other corporations will, tho).
Second, what 13-headed hydra of a committee DESIGNED their encryption specs? This is the second glaring hole found.
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Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Early DVD decoder cards for PCs were pretty much wide-open. You could change your region code at will. Now, more and more decoder cards have a little EPROM (or somesuch) that counts the number of region changes, and if it's changed around too much, it will stop allowing you to change the region code and you'll be stuck.
Some cards will set the region code based on the first DVD you play (more "user-friendly" that way), and if you happen to have a multi-region DVD, you're stuck thinking the damned thing doesn't work.
Decoder card manufacturers naturally don't like to advertise this, nor are DVD manufacturers hot to talk about zoning, because most people keep the player in one region and won't use DVDs from other regions.
The media types will one day discover that you can't increase profits by throwing roadblocks in front of your customers.
-dwd-
<SARCASM>
Well, at least you guys are free to own guns.
</SARCASM>
Reminds me of drug dealers.
The rot has spread to the UK too.
On two consecutive mornings this week, the morning news programme on BBC Radio 4 carried "reports" where BPI (British Phonographic Industry, i.e. the UK's record industry body) told how widespread piracy was putting everyone in the media industry out of business. Then they went on to interview senior police officers who verified this. There was an air of unreality about the whole thing, though. The people interviewed were hardly well-known; I guess you can always find someone to support your view whatevr it happens to be, especially if it means they get to go "gee, look ma, I was on the radio".
But in the second programme, things took a distinct turn for the worse. After a police officer spoke first, we heard somebody declaring that the same people running "piracy" operations on CD's were also dealing in arms, hard drugs and illegal hard pornography! They said it was a fact that the revenue from piracy of CD's and videos was financing arms for terrorist outfits.
But that's not all...immediately after that quote, they then had a guy come on who reiterated the arms connection, a guy speaking in an Irish accent.
I'm convinced by this that the BBC are seeking to manipulate public opinion on behalf of the BPI and other allied bodies. I suppose they think they are protecting their own interests since the BBC have a huge storehouse of recorded material that they see as "intellectual property" which can be ripped off.
It just saddens me to see the BBC stooping so low. Misinformation and cynical manipulation we might have expected from big business and politicians, but to see the BBC doing this just makes me sick to my stomach.
So the UK too is now at war. Only, most people don't know it and probably never will before those evil bastards manage to silence us forever.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hmmm. A little extrapolation...
A manufacuturer makes a DVD player that allows you to play discs from any zone and sales sky rocket. Other mfgs, needing to compete, also make their players to play any zone. Pretty soon "Any Zone Play" becomes a standard selling feature on all DVD players. So even if MPAA continues its practice of zone ecrypting its products, it is all moot.
So here we have a customer and (foreign) retailer rebellion that will lead to the defeat of the zoning scheme. It's easy to see the supermarket's concern: it stands to lose sales to Internet orders from the US. Of course, once some entrepreneur in India or Zimbabwe starts up an Internet DVD sales site, even North Americans will be flocking to buy Any Zone players and US and Canadian retailers will be demanding and end to zoning.
How did this come about? Did the MPAA forget to put a restriction in the DVD licence forbidding makers to allow any zone playing? Or was there some loophole in the wording that allows the players to be switchable manually, but perhaps not automatically?
And what is the MPAA going to do about it? Are the going to take the manufacturers to court to try to stop them? Even if they have grounds based on the DVD licence, might they risk having the whole scheme challenged as violating international trade laws?
And how does this situation affect the DeCSS fiacso? With zoning being made moot, is there any point to even needing a licence to make a player? Even if the ulterior motive is to get a precedent ruling on a DMCA reverse engineering situation, this mooting of region coding would seem to take some strength out their prima facie arguments of the sacredness of their disc encryption.
Ideology is for ideots.
Enought people here seem to not know why country codes exist, that I feel it makes sense to go over the reasoning. I'm not saying that this is sound business practice, or that it's justified. I'm just explaining the reasoning.
The basic problem is that most of the worlds most popular Enlgish-speaking movies are made in the United States (some of that is changing with Canada, New Zealand and the UK producing more and more winners). Because of this, movies tend to be released in the US first. Now, they can't really release them in more than one to three countries at a time (just doing the whole US is quite a strain) because of the logistics. You really want to have a big media event surrounding the release, so you gather up some of your actors and crew and screen the movie for select folk with a red carpet and lots of photographers.
Ok, given that you do that one to three countries at a time, and schedules are hard to sync up, you very often wind up in the situation that by the time the film is opening in some late-on-the-list part of the world, the video release has hit shelves in the US. So, you show up to do your premier and everyone yawns, 'cause they've been buying import versions for weeks.
What's worse, the money that a movie makes tends to be in the form of 1/2 of a bell-curve (the descending part) for the theater release and a much more gradual, but simmilarly shaped curve when the video comes out. So, if you reduce the impact of opening weekend, you might easily lose a major chunk of the sales for the box-office, and that sales boost you were expecting from the video release is now moot.
There are holes in this theory, and let's face it, Hollywood is not run on quality data-gathering operations. Personally, I think that staging one huge opening per movie and broadcasting it to the world simultaneous with the release of the film in theaters would make more sense, at least for the english-speaking countries. It would require more pre-release work because you have to go through the censorship machinery of all of those countries before your release, but the impact would be greater, I suspect. You could move around, and have the opening for each film be in a different country, thus allowing people in those countries to get access. Certainly the first bunch of films that did this would get huge amounts of press.
But, it's probably better to just let Hollywood die under the weight of foriegn competition. More and more work is moving out to Canada and NZ, and this is good. Hollywood will have to develop new ways of coping. In a way, what's going on now reflects what happened in the comic book industry in the late 80's and early 90's. Back then independants were becoming wildly popular, because they dared to have original content. In the end, the result was that most of the indies went broke when the market consolidated, a few strengthened and did well (e.g. Dark Horse) and DC (Superman, Batman, et al.) ended up creating a whole section just for doing interesting adult-themed, story-focused "comics" that didn't all center on super-heroes (e.g. Sandman, which has been mentioned a couple of times on Slashdot). This is essentially what Hollywood is in the middle of. Content is slowly winning.
As for country codes, it's just an artifact, a minor spin-off of these industry forces. The whole idea will seem foolish in 10 years. How can country codes prevail once movies are delivered over the Internet? I'm waiting for the day when every theater has 2 screens dedicated to showing whatever an on-line vote picked for the day. Once theaters can download movies and pay on a per-play basis instead of locking in weeks at a time, they will be able to offer whatever non-in-first-run movies will fill a theater. This will allow popular movies to keep making money in the theater even after they're on video. Right now, theater owners don't want to lock-in to a movie that's already on video, 'cause they can't guarantee that people will come see it in the theater vs. watching it on video.
Wow, this rambled a bit more than I had wanted. I think I'll stop now.
Many items have seperate releases in NA & in Europe (& probably other markets, but I have no expericence there). Books, CDs and movies are often avilable first in one or the other area. There are rational reasons for this, they are different markets and sometimes the promoter cannot afford to promote in both markets at the same time, and actors, auothros etc obviously cannot be in two places at once. No-one objects to this, it's a fact of life.
I can obviously read a book bought from anywhere, and I can buy a VCR tape from wherever I want, and play it. The only restriction is that different countries use different formats, and that's historical, with many modern VCRs handle oth NTSC & PAL/SECAM. I can also handle the formats of books used in Spain and France (With a little difficulty, but that's my fault nothing to do with the technology).
I emigrated a few years ago, and took lots of CD's with me. I still listen to those CD's, and I've also bought several imported CD's over the years, first those brought over from region 1, then those brought over from Europe. I have books bought from all over the world, and I could have taken my VCR tapes with me if I decided to buy a multiformat VCR.
Can anyone give a rational reason why DVD should be any different to these other media?
Did you know that, the release of the DVD format was delayed at least a year because hollywood refused to accept a digital format that could mean the end of the NTSC/PAL pseudo control they had until then? Since a movie could be stored in mpeg2 at 24 frames/s, and then the device could output the signal at PAL or NTSC or whatever in real time; the studios would inmediatly loose the pseudo restriction they had by delaying the release of the movies on video in the proper format (aka, the other non NTSC ones) that prevented "too many people" doing casual imports (since they had to buy extra equipment, to view NTSC, etc) it seems that they still are unaware of the very popular pseudo-ntsc capability that many "non NTSC" devices had all these years, since for them its very simple to view NTSC imports than for us is to see PAL... Anyway region codes and macrovision were added at the last moment, and even then only half of them agreed to support DVD. See, the format was never intended to use those "features" on the first place; that's why they were so simple to "ignore", even from day 0; early DVD players don't even seek for the region code byte or even have the macrovision chip.
With the crack of CSS, stupid hollywood fears on loosing control would rise again against the format, and that explains the current DVDCA attitude; althought it never justifies it. Will the DVD format die? If manufacturers go subversive and start making non compliant devices; ignoring DVDCA complains (although they would have problems for sales in the US) therefore making DVD players as cheap as they really are, it will then last way longer than expected; even without Hollywood contempt, alternate markets will take their place (say, what you insist to call pirates) and many, many devices will be sold worldwide; with or without studios blessings. They could take advantage by adopting it and forget about their stupid already lost control on "movie release schedule" (it's more let the middlemans be happy) or go totally against it (Hi J. Lucas) and let the alternate market take full control (and revenue).
The way you see it, DVD manufacturers could always win, many of them are also part of the "Consortium", and hey! they even own some of the studios too! (Sony anyone?) Of course if the format is pushed to the death (very unlikely now that *anyone* can make their own player, the real treat of DeCSS to the Consortium) they would lose, So if the MPAA don't pay more attention, they could make angry some of their big Associates...
In the end, we will all use Opendvd, or "unlicensed" or whatever digital open format we see fit (even VCDs with mpeg2 video aka SuperVCDs aka VCD2s get distributed by alternate means these days); they could be against their customers, or with them; they may get some of the revenue or none at all, they may adopt or kill the format, we will see. One thing is clear, the way they used to do things, vertically by maintaing an iron grip control over their customers is over. Same goes to Music Recording Industries; only that we don't need them already anymore, with CD-Rs and MP3s.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I guess they only make x prints of a film for movie theatres, and then ship them around the world, first in the US, then Europe, then Asia, etc. This is to avoid the cost of making a copy of the film for every theatre in the world.
What can happen is that movies are available on video/DVD in the US before they have even played in theatres elsewhere. They want to prevent people from buying (or worse, renting) the DVD instead of going to the theatres.
I guess you missed the point of my original message: If you don't like paying the price for DVDs, then buy the video tape. Or rent the DVD, or VHS, or LD. You use the word cartel, but ignore the possibility of just ignoring the cartel by NOT buying in to their "insideous" plan by simply not purchasing their wares.
The price of laser discs was high becuase they were niche-market. People who wanted the quality and the experience were willing to pay for it. This is the way vinyl records will probably go now: if you want a decent player and decently mastered/pressed records then it'll cost you, becuase very few people want the added enjoyment that people claim they have over CDs.
DVDs are a different issue. They are a mass market product, which will gradually cause VHS to be phased out. Not immedietly, because we can't record yet, but they will, eventually. Now - with Laserdisc I could import American titles if I wanted to, but I would need to import a TV and voltage convertor to get it all to work. With DVD there's no technological barrier to watching DVDs anywhere.... except that which is forced on us, the consumer. Now, I don't think there's a problem with manufacturers selling anything they want. If they don't bow to consumer demands, they'll go out of business - who cares? It's their problem. But when they start arresting people for playing back movies which they legitimately own, that's going too far. I can't import movies from the US because they've been crippled. High street stores are scared to sell players that are multi-region in case they get accused of hacking. But the MPAA may just have met their match in Tesco, who are very used to getting their own way, and have the hard cash to back it up.
I posted a comment in a previous DVD topic, about the way encryption keys could be used by the DVDCCA to effectively make obscelete ranges of players by simply not encoding the keys on certain discs. If you feel confident in the DVDCCA then read this and tell me you don't feel scared. It seems to me that by letting earlier players be multi-region, they have seeded the market and let it grow, and now they're tightening the net. They've lied to movie studios and said that region coding is for anti-piracy; in fact it makes very little difference. I, for one, do not trust them.
Add to this the idiocy of the BBFC: they demand that SUPPLEMENTS on DVDs, such as outtakes and making of documentaries, need a BBFC certficate in order to pass, henceforth the DVD producer has to submit that material and a fee to the BBFC. This is supposedly one of the reasons Criterion doesn't release their discs in the UK.
Add to this that it is not technically illegal to chip, modify, or hack a DVD player to play all Region discs - but it is illegal for a store clerk to suggest to you how to do it or provide help with it. All European DVD players can play NTSC or PAL - and several have super easy hacks to defeat the coding, such as a combination to put in the remote. Search the web and thou shalt find...
Now it gets even weirder. Some DVDs in the UK are released as anamorphic (enhanced for widescreen TVs) when they aren't in the U.S. because of wider market penetration of widescreen TVs in Europe.
Region Coding is extremely defeatable. I recommend heartily anyone with a Windoze system to watch DVDs on to use the Creative Labs DXR3 kit - a DVD drive, and a dedicated decoder board ready for 5.1 surround sound for 150 - 200 US dollars. Go to This site and download a 500 k app that lets you defeat region coding piece o cake. Basically, for about 150 dollars for DXR3, 300 dollars for my Videologic 5.1 surround kit, and a simple app I have a region free DVD player routed to my 16x9 capable television.
I buy some Region DVDs of movies that haven't been released here in the U.K. because a) I'm an American, moving back to America in a year, and I want DVDs that will work there b) American DVDs tend to have more supplements and c) A movie in Central London will litearally cost you 20$ for a decent seat. This way I can watch a movie without a dim projector bulb and crappy reel changes and some idiot's mobile phone going off while they're talking during the movie.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Maybe next time you should read the story all the way through. I think it's apparent by the third paragraph that the movie industry is truly concerned about the rights of the consumer:
I hope this silences anyone who would accuse the movie industry of any less-than-noble intentions.
is called the RAITE AVPhile 715. His GF bought it for about $150 from Frys Electronics. Not only does it play DVDs, but also CDs, VCDs, and MP3s (ISO formatted). I think it's manufactured somewhere in Europe.
*AND* we learned on the net that you can shut off region codes & Macrovision with certain sequences on the remote control.
I found this too while looking for something else: http://www2.datatestlab.com/regionhacks/ - it seems to have info for circumventing regions on multiple players.
thought someone might be interested,
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I expect that, since someone in the UK press has published information on how to circumvent controls on accessing copyrighted material, that the MPAA will file a lawsuit (or they will find someone in the UK willing to file on their behalf) posthaste.
I mean, if a couple of "evil hackers" in Norway can't write a program to get around CSS, then why should "the hi-fi press" (?) in the UK be able to publish information on how to hack the units themselves?
And isn't it interesting that the ones that can be set to play any region discs have skyrocketed in popularity? Now, would that be because people (the people in Britian, anyways) value the freedom that OpenDVD, the EFF and others are championing on our behalf? Or is the MPAA and their apologists going to try to claim that the owners of these DVD players are all pirates?
Jay (=
Yeah....just like DeCSS is designed to maximize piracy. Sure.
I'm a firm believer in allowing market forces to dictate the state of the market. DVD zoning is not a piracy prevention tool. It's an electronic measure for specifying market barriers - barriers which, in this age, should not be defined by artifical means. If I want to watch an imported Japanese porn flick on my plain-vanilla Pioneer DVD player, I should have every right to. If I want to watch a classic French film brought here from Europe, the same goes. Having a zoning system in place restricts perfectly legitimate uses of the DVD system and allows orchestrated price controls (like those that Tesco is fighting against) to exist.
Now, granted, I am not a professional economist and can't speak for trade barriers, import restrictions, tariffs, etc. But the whole point of economic measures like those is allow the market to dictate the price of goods. If a Euro-zone DVD costs more to import because of a set tariff, then fine! If I'm willing to pay the price then I should at least have the ability to view the film. If UK DVDs are being priced artificially high, however, that's allowing the industry to leverage monopolistic price controls (i.e. zoning) and shouldn't continue.
"Here here" to Tesco.
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
"Film studios say zoning is designed to minimise piracy. But Ms Cross said it was 'against the spirit of free competition and a potential trade barrier. We'll fight so the prices come down.'"
I have to agree with Cross. The regional codes are more about protecting their "right" to profit gouge rather than to prevent piracy.
We can defeat their regional codes.
We can defeat their weak encryption schemes.
Why don't they learn their lesson and just sell us our movies in a sensible way?
...without having to do any hardware mods to the player (there are geeks who fear hardware). :)
Slashdot covered this a while back, but what you want is the Apex AD-600A. You can get it at Circuit City for between $150 and $190 (CC has been playing with the price in different parts of the country, a "region-coding" of their own, I guess -- Circuit City can't be all good, now, they've got that DiVX legacy of evil to keep up with).
CC doesn't keep them on the shelves, but just have the sales droid punch in "APX AD-600A" into his terminal if he doesn't know what you're talking about.
When /. covered this product it was mainly over its ability to play MP3's. I don't personally care too much about that, but here's what I do like:
The disadvantages, in my opinion:
Anyway, many of the above ergonomic limitations could be overcome by revisions to the firmware, I'm sure. And there seems to be enough of a hacker community around this player that people might just end up hacking the firmware (you'd have to buy an EEPROM replacement for the existing firmware chip, though -- while socketed for easy replacement, it is not reprogrammable). I wonder if Apex is nuts enough to open-source their firmware and turn the geeks loose on it?
Oh yeah, how to get to the loopholes menu: without a disc in the player, "SETUP" -> select the preferences item -> "STEP" -> chapter/track back "|<<" -> chapter/track forward ">>|". Have fun...
Address-collecting spam robots don't know how to crack ROT13. Do you?