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Blockbuster Chief: End DVD Region Codes
Xesdeeni writes "Blockbuster's President/COO Nigel Travis has called for the elimination of the DVD region code. At issue is the situation when a movie is released in one country several months before it is released in another. He points out that pirates 'can drive a cart and horses through these holes in the release schedule.'"
The industry is going to hate it. Is Blockbuster big enough to complain loud enough?
I think they just might be.
Never confuse volume with power.
Not being funny, but I thought that the region coding was ceasing to be a problem because a high percentage of the devices you buy now can circumvent it anyways.
What I'd like to see them doing is ending staggered releases worldwide and releasing everywhere on the same day.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
Now whether having a standard no-code product instead of multiple regional products in the same language saves money for the DVD producers is another story, but he didn't mention that.
They could just release the same version of the DVD simultaneously in all regions?
After all, if they simply junked region codes, we'd have Studios complaining about people importing foreign versions of movies for which the hold "exclusive North American rights"
The whole codes thing just seemed to smack of a money grab anyway. More or less the equivalent of trade barriers. Consider this approach:
- Trader A buys DVD in country X for $n
- Trader A sells DVD in country Y for $n+m
Hmmmm. Seems like a nice, free-trade policy that anyone in the Enron Adminstration would support. But codes _try_ to prevent that free trade, saying, hey, you can't sell it over here.
I think the producers of coded DVDs should be sued under WTO rules as prohibiting fair trade.
...tizzyd
The big studios won't give up without a fight, even though it benefits them in no way to keep the rest of the world waiting.
It's never made sense to me just why they make us (The UK) wait so long for movies after their release in the US, when no changes are required (except maybe a couple of censorship issues). All it means is that if the movie is crap, we hear about it well in advance and then don't go and see it.
Nice plan!
Pirates can drive a cart through the holes in the release schedule whether there's region codes or not, but the holes in the release schedules will still be there whether the region codes are in place or not.
Doing additional dubs and subtitling takes time, making simultaneous release worldwide somewhat tricky, unless you plan on delivering a "one size fits all" product, or holding up the release of an essentially finished and ready for Market X product until the product is ready for Markets A-Z. One size fits all product means either limiting content to the most restrictive censorship laws in all the regions you want to distribute in. Holding up the release date until all are ready means movies will lose their currency and timeliness.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Piracy is obviously a problem but I wonder how much an issue is due to legal sales from one region to another.
I regularly buy region 1 DVDs and have them shipped to the UK. I don't believe I am doing anything legally wrong and certainly don't believe it is morally wrong. This gives me a DVD months earlier than I can normally get it locally and its often cheaper as well even taking postage into acount.
Strange how this trade wasn't mentioned in the article at all....
wot no sig
This is why many big films like LOTR now have simultaneous International release. It was 6 months before Finding Nemo was released in the UK. I bitTorrented the film because I couldn't be bothered to wait that long. Needless to say when it did come out in the cinema I decided to go see Matrix Revolutions instead.
Most DVD Players now come with region unlock codes or are just plain chipped. The region 1 DVD's are also easily available in the UK (region 2)
All this makes region coding useless.
Isn't region coding also designed for price fixing?
The point of this is to assure everyone, including end users who aren't very mentally endowed can view the dvds they paid for, regardless of where they buy them. Especially take into consideration millitary families who move from place to place, DVD regioning is bad for all, but more bad for some than others. Sure, they'll be fine with swapping between the three dvd players they had to buy in the last 2 years to play all of their dvds, but that's not ideal, and there is always the problem of when one of them breaks.
The other part of this is that one would hope it could turn into a consumer digital rights stand where consumers demand to be able to do whatever they like with what they buy, but I doubt that will happen. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with them producing dvds that can't have previews skipped, that are region encoded, etc, but I do NOT think that law should require dvd player manufacturers to adhear to your will.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
I travel back and forth from Europe all the time and unfortunately few of the DVDs that I have legitimately purchased will work both places whereas burned movies work just fine everywhere. For me it has been a pretty good reason NOT to buy DVD movies because if I PAY for them, it will only work half the time! I have had to search P2P networks for movies that I own on DVD because my "legal" copy won't work.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Part of the reason for region encoding is licensing to television. The franchise rights to exclusively air a program may be sold here in the States, but not so often overseas, so studios find themselves in a situation where they would love to release a popular film or show overseas while it is hot, but cannot do so in the States because it would step on the toes of a local station airing the same show. With video, this was not a big deal, since the NTSC and PAL formats were incompatable and trader was limited, but with modern play-all devices and e-commerce, it became neccessary to restrict overseas movie purchases some other way.
Last year I was in London on my Honeymoon. We ened up doing a lot of shopping and hit a few music/video stores. My wife, who had no idea what region codes were, started picking up a few DVDs that are not available in the US. (A couple of them were Eddie Izzard as I recall) She was very disappointed when I told her that these DVDs would not play in the DVD palayers at home without hacking them.
Whoever was distributing those DVDs LOST money since we can't buy them here (I've never seen them on shelves here and I didn't care enough about them to try to find them on Amazon). Really, what kind of business model is it to make it impossible to buy your product? Drop the region codes and they will probabily increase sales and kill a few pirates in the process!
[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...] - Larry Wall in Configure from the perl
This is price discrimination and happens all the time. Basically, you make the people who can (and are willing) to pay more for something pay more and the people who can pay less, pay less. (You maximize profits for both sections.)
Airline tickets for business travelers cost more because they can afford it. Don't want to stay over? Ticket will cost more. Prescription medication, too. Early adopters? Them, too.
This isn't wrong, per se. It is essential capitialism and does nothing to mitigate free trade.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I think the main reason Hollywood films come out in the UK later than the US is to allow time for PR in each country, with actors, directors etc expected to come to London and talk to a lot of newspapers, magazines, TV Programmes etc. Naturally, this is reflected in the DVD release schedule. Films like the Matrix sequels and LOTR require less PR than others, as everyone knows about them anyway. I do think Piracy will lead to more films coming out simultaneously throughout the world, which will make region codes less necessary.
Mod parent up!
That's easy, if a DVD is available in one region, but not in another Blockbuster can't sell it there. By the time the DVD is released in that region, many people interested in seeing the movie will have already downloaded it. That means less revenue for blockbuster.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, I think the system sucks, but the benefits are pretty clear (for the industry) - take, a 'foreign movie' such as "28 Days Later" as an example.
released in Nov 2002 in the UK, it took until late June 2003 for it to find a release in the US. The DVD was released in the UK in May 2003. US distributors will typically wait a long time to gauge how a movie does overseas before they risk it on US audiences.
this happens all the time - more often in reverse too: finding Nemo was on DVD in the US before it was released to theaters in all the major European markets.
It doesn't take a genius to see that releasing a DVD onto the market before the movie is a risky thing to do without region encoding.
It'll likely disappear in any case: the reasons to do this are disappearing, and mainly because of the threat of Kazaa piracy rather than DVD modding.
Releases like Matrix Revolutions proved that the distribution and promotion can support even a crap movie well enough to release it simultaneously across the world, and this is the way things'll go pretty soon.
I'd expect region encoding to disappear pretty soonish if this pattern really does catch on, but I worry that it'll be the little(r) guys (28 Days Later) that might catch the pain if so.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Could they also remove the friggin' un-skippable sections on DVDs? I have all 4 seasons of Futurama, for example, and at the start I am forced to sit through at least 60 seconds of copyright warnings for about 6 different countries followed by the 20th Century Fox animated logo. Ironically enough, because Fox decided not to do a different release for every region, the compulsory crap is twice as long because there is a warning for half of Europe, the UK and Australia and New Zealand.
It's a big step back for usability when the user can no longer control (i.e. use) the product the way they prefer to. With VHS we could skip trailers, copyright notices and assorted other bullshit - with DVDs they ram it down our throats. I mean, is there *anyone* of the millions of DVD owners who *actually* reads the copyright warnings *every single time* they come on? Are we too stupid to be allowed to skip the warnings if we choose, even though we've seen them a hundred times before? Surely it's enough that we can read the warnings if we want to, and that it is clear that we can do so.
The decisions made in the development of the DVD format smack of a cartel, not a collaboration between rivals.
Read Pynchon.
No, you can't stop the people who are actually pirates with lawsuits. The pirates that "drive carts and horses" through the holes in these ridiculous release schedules are the kind that are really pirates. That is, they're really criminals. With guns. Like organized crime.
The MPAA/RIAA has done a good job of brainwashing willfully ignorant people into thinking that "pirate" means some harmless 15 year old kid with pimples that's downloading all the latest releases for their own use. They're not pirates, they're just punks with no money. Pirates really cause problems. There really are pirates and they really are selling bootlegs and they really can be dangerous criminals. They're the ones that are actually pressing illegal copies of games, music, and DVDs and selling them for huge profits. It's like a whole business model and it takes coordinated law-enforcement efforts to bust the operations.
I've always wondered when someone of consequence would wake up and point out that DVD region encoding is a HUGE catalyst for overseas piracy. If they run a profiteering racket by not releasing a DVD for months (or ever) in certain countries (so as to prevent market saturation and allow them to, effectively, sell 5 or 6 "different" copies of the same, often unchanged, movie over a period of years, each at a full price because you have to buy your own special regionalized version) it's just a huge enabler for people who want to sell bootlegs.
Think about it. If the movie has been out for three months in Japan and is selling used for 1/3 of the original price, why should I have to wait for them to release it in the U.S. and have to pay full price only because it's "region encoded". It's a scam, plain and simple, and the pirates are having a field day with it.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Your comment almost makes sense.
Releasing regional versions as they are ready does not require (or benefit from) lock-out codes. If the initial release kills the market for localized versions, so much the better for the studio.
Doing away with lock-out codes would allow people in "other" markets to use (buy) the initial release if they choose. Currently their only choice is "piracy." Who does that help?
The only thing left standing is price-fixing.
-Peter
It's not like the consumer has a lot of say in this beyond buying a region free DVD player (which retail chains in the US do not sell). They either accept the region code, CSS, Macrovision, forced ad viewing, and all of the other crap the industry forced into DVDs...or they keep their tapes and slowly move into obsoleceance. Tapes are out, studios are going to stop releasing most of their stuff on tape in the near future (it's already becoming increasingly difficult to find tapes).
It's not like the consumers had any say into the design of the DVD spec. The studios have a monopoly (copyright) on pretty much all of the movies made in the past 75 years. If the studios didn't get their way, they could have killed DVDs before they even got started.
I read the internet for the articles.
So what, they can't have people doing a French dub at the same time they're doing to Spanish dub?
Why don't they start work on this as soon as the movie hits theaters, or better yet, once post production starts. That gives them plenty of time to find voice actors and get all the dubs and other material together before the DVD hits shelves in 3 to 6 months.
Now for censorship laws and such, you'll have a problem doing a one size fits all approach. But for most places, I don't see why they can't have all the subtitles and dubs prepared in time.
-- Jason
With digital television, there is even the opportunity for consolidation. But do you think that anyone will want to let go their standard ? No way... It's sad to have to go through another VHS/Betamax debacle all over again. Some people/industries will never learn.
I don't see why you got modded troll, since this is a good question... except that it would be even better if you asked: is there anyone who wants a region-free DVD player who doesn't have one? I have two questions for the Slashdot audience that would help me answer the question, since I'm pretty sure my $59 DVD unit from Target is not region-free.
1) Are there any affordable region free players available legally in the U.S.? I'm not spending $400 on a region-free player when I could just buy one Region 1 player at $59 and then some other region's player for a different $59 (plus shipping and handling, I suppose)?
2) While understanding that there are potential problems using my Sony DVD-ROM drive (purchased in America, so presumably Region 1 if the region is somehow coded into the device) in GNU/Linux due to the legal issues surrounding DeCSS and other decoding libraries, is there any reason to fear that a standard issue DVD-ROM drive and programs like mplayer or xine would have trouble playing DVDs from other regions? [I would try this myself, but I'm not really hot on the idea of picking up a non-Region 1 DVD just as an experiment]
Thanks.
Doing additional dubs and subtitling takes time, making simultaneous release worldwide somewhat tricky
It seems to me that if anything, having multiple worldwide releases for different languages, would be beneficial.
Say a studio makes a worldwide release of a Hollywood movie as soon as the DVD is complete in english. If somebody in China spoke english well enough to get something out of it, they should be able to buy the english version. Then when the studio releases a Chinese version, that person might buy that one too. It seems like an opportunity for studios to make multiple sales on the same release.
But the real advantage is that an American that happens to be in China (with a Chinese-region encoded DVD player) would be able to buy the real movie, as soon as it was released, instead of buying a pirated version.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
for region codes, would be if the actual disc + cover was manufactered in the country it's sold in. As a way to protect local company/workers.
I wouldn't mind paying a lot of money for a dvd if it was also printed here in Norway and the money went to support national economy.
As it is now a DVD is made/printed in China for 0.5Nkr (I've got no idea about how much it is but 0.5Nkr sounds reasonable) and is sold here for 299Nkr (~$44) with region code so that you actually are forced to buy it at a ridiculous price, without any of the money going back into 'the system'.
It's even worse for PS-2 games with prices here in Norway in the $85-100 range.
Actually, where I live (Netherlands) I don't think they even sell TVs anymore that can't handle PAL and NTSC just as easy (and a fairly large percentage also does SECAM in both versions)
:)
The only thing you'll notice is that the quality of NTSC movies will be a lot lower than you're used to with PAL movies.
Running Region 1 NTSC DVDs here is easy enough. The last DVD player I saw had these instructions with it to make it region-free: Push eject button. While door is open, press play. The DVD player is now regionfree.
I mean, seriously, where's the problem
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
There ends my rant for the day.
Stick Men
It should be obvious to anyone that given the choice always buy the region 1 DVD player.
no, in europe, given the choice, always buy the multiregion player that can play anything. virtually all our machines are multiregion these days.
afaik, the problem with buying plain region 1 players is a) sourcing them and b) they probably only support ntsc, and not pal and secam that much of the rest of the world uses.
dave
Seems to me that the method is indeed very effective when you only need to use one movie. However, if Blockbuster is trying to sway the entire movie industry, they'd have to drop the "Guaranteed in Stock" thing with every new release. If customers start getting frustrated because they can't find any of the newly released movies they want to see, they go to other rental stores...wouldn't Blockbuster thus stand to lose too much to make this tactic viable on a large scale?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
DVDs in different regions are sold for different prices. If DVDs were regionless then via the magic that is the Internet and FedEx, everyone would start buying DVDs from the cheapest marketplaces. Content producers would then be faced with a tough decision which would most likely result in DVDs not being sold in cheaper markets to protect their profits in the lucrative markets, or they'd sell them at full price in the cheaper markets which would just result in more piracy in those markets.
Personally I hate region codes (having friends/relatives in other region really sucks) but DVDs aren't the only thing subjected to the non-level playing field that is the global marketplace.
The whole region code thing maybe worked when DVD players were a grand apiece. Now that I can buy 3 for $150 down at the local Circuit City and pick 3 regions what the heck is the point? And that's if I want to do it legally. As noted a hundred times above it's trivial to make a drive multi-region or back up a DVD with the region code stripped out.
BB is right. This nonsense needs to go.
another AC
28 days leter success had noting to do with region codes.
They didn't advertise it was available on DVD. ergo the consumer was not aware that it had been released.
The smaller the movie is, the smaller the demand is. So releasing "relativly unknown movie" in one country, then releasing a movie later in another country won't be impacted as much, because there won't be a mad rush to see the film because very few would of heard of it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just badly implemented layer switch in your player. Every player has to support dual layer; yours just does so crappily.
Although those of us who travel internationally aren't the majority of all consumers, the industry has no excuse to make watching DVD's from different regions so painful. Plus, when my foreign friends bring DVD's from their homes to watch together, we have problems.
I just think that DVD regions are a bad idea.
Oh yes it is! The damn thing is even out of stock.
Wow, this is timely. I just posted a GrepLaw article about the subject of region codes.
Unfortunately, the CEO of Blockbuster was not interested in whether or not region codes were fundamentally evil. He was only concerned with the fact that their implementation caused an increase in piracy and a decrease in his revenues. I like the irony of the fact that a system that the MPAA created to impose unfair pricing has actually benefitted their illicit competitors. Here is hoping the MPAA continues to shoot itself in the foot.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Did you read the parent before replying? He didn't say there was a difference between PAL and SECAM discs he said there is a difference between NTSC and PAL/SECAM players.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Really, how many people are watching foreign DVD's??
I think it would be more noteable if they were to remove Macrovision that region coding.
I know a lot of people that have OLD TV sets that have no other choice than to plug the DVD player into the VCR then run the RF out of the VCR into the TV on Ch3 or Ch4..
Macrovision makes for a very, very poor viewing experiance in the above scenario. These folks are older folks that are not going to run out and buy new TV sets to use the cheap DVD players they received as gifts..
I say DEATH to Macrovision and who really cares about region coding..
BTW, and this is preaching to the choir, but we all know that anyone with a PC can go to block buster, rent a DVD and do whatever the hell they want with it. Copy protection is a failed experiment. Get rid of it and let's improve the picture quality. It's the right thing to do.
But, this could be an isolated incident.
Far from it, many DVD players in europe (and around the world) are either multi-region out of the box or easily set to multi region by entering 'secret codes' into special hidden areas of the machine's set up menu. For the rest that aren't easily switched (which are oddly the more expensive 'branded' models), there are companies that can modify them to be region free.
I think region coding really only restricts Americans, the rest of the planet happily carries on with little if any notice of region coding at all.
Tk
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Standard microeconomic theory. It's a second grade discriminatory monopoly. I'll try to explain it in steps.
Every studio has a monopoly over its own movie. Yeah-yeah-yeah, theres a degree of substitution-ability between them, but let's just assume we want "The Matrix" and nothing else.
In a common monopoly, the monopolist faces a demand function, relating the price he sets to the ammount he manages to sell. There are a number of techniques economists learn in order to estimate demand functiond, and the Cobb-Douglas General Function Form tends to be the most adequate simple continuous algebraic function for that, but you can use a linear function if you feel like doing some numeric exercises.
So, the profit function of the monopolist is
PROFIT = PRICE * QUANTITY - COST
As we've seen, the quantity the monopolist manages to seel is a function of the price - as is the cost, but we said it'd be constant.
PROFIT (price) = PRICE * QUANTITY(PRICE) - COST (QUANTITY(PRICE))
To simplify the calculus involved, and since there's always one and only one quantity for each price in a common (linear or Cobb-Douglas) demand function, we tend to write price as a function of quantity - that is, the price the monopolist must charge in order to sell a certain quantity. It can be easily done the other way around using the chain rule, but the notation'd get really confusing. So,
profit(quantity) = price (quantity) * quantity - cost (quantity)
By common calculus, profit is at its maximum when
d(profit)/d(quantity) = 0
So, by the product rule,
dp/dq + p - dc/dq = 0
Thus,
dp/dq + p = dc/dq
The dc/dq argument depends on the production structure of the firm and we won't use it here. The central thing here is how sensitive is the quantity purchased to how price changes, or equivalently, how much must one lower the price to sell one more unit.
The form of the p(q) function depends mainly on consumer preferences and their budget restriction. Assuming that preferences for The Matrix (versus alternative uses of the money) are the same all over the world, let's just focus on budget restrictions.
If budget restriction determines the demand function for a specific country, you can as well sum all the q(p) demand functions and get an international qi(p) demand function. You can then invert it to pi(q) form to fit it in our profit-maximizing criterium.
You can easily see that, if you can charge only one price worldwide, the fact that if Argentina is affected by a crisis, and they start buying less DVD's, you face the trade-off between charging less in Argentina (and elsewhere!) and selling less worlwide, or charge the same and sell less in Argentina. The importance of Argentina in the worldwide DVD market will end up determining how much lower your optimal price will go.
So, yes, region encoding puts the producer in an advantage regarding the consumer. It's a market failure, and it happens because of the monopoly.
On the other hand, if you can charge different prices in different countries, you can squeeze Denmark more than Argentina, since they will be willing to pay more for the same product. The extreme case is the third degree monopoly, where the seller can charge a different price for each consumer, and squeeze all their willingness to pay to the end, not facing any trade-off at all.
It's complicated enough there, but add exchange rates deviation from Purchasing Power Parity. In fact, it's how much the current exchange deviates from PPP that (mostly) determines how much international trade is done, and in which direction. In fact, foreign currency traders are the True Illuminati of the early-2000's.
And yes, it makes much more sense to try to regulate DVD coding than to try to regulate currency traders away from pushing exchange rates back to PPP. Ideally, monopoly regulations should make monopolistic firms as if there was no monopoly, that is, as if there was such a large market
I don't see the studios changing their minds on this. They put region codes into DVD's so that they could charge as much as the local market would bear. 5 Rupee(?) DVD's sold in India would flood the US market. Why should anyone pay a penny when they can get dinged 25 bucks? Screw the globalization/free trade stuff. From the other perspective, it's really hard to wipe out foreign film makers if you charge locals a weeks wages for a DVD!
I just read/skimmed through all 103 posts modded 3 or higher, and I can't believe that not one person mentioned the DMCA/EUCD.
The problem isn't that the DVD's are region coded. The problem is that the DVD players are intentionally crippled not to be able to play out-of-region disks. But even that is merely a symptom. All manufacturers WANT to produce all-region players - they'd sell better. The DISEASE is stupid LAWS that force manufacturers to produce crippled products. The disease is laws like the DMCA and EUCD.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The region coding argument (that it is to protect the movie studios that release movies at different times into different markets) doesn't hold up when an old movie is is released on DVD. Surely a movie from the 90's shouldn't have a region code, because the movie is not being shown in theaters.
When I was a kid, I lived in Britain and France. As a result, I like british and french movies and television. Unfortunately, most of the stuff that is available is Region 2, and is NOT RELEASED here in the states. So while it may delay piracy for a few months (except for those of us with a multi-region player, or a second DVD-drive with an altered region setting so that we can rip and re-burn), it completely screws those of us who like to watch stuff that is not released at all here.