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Geoblocking, Licensing, and Piracy Make For Tough Choices at Netflix (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If Netflix's promise to invigilate users' IP addresses and block VPNs is more than a placatory sop to the lawyers, and if the studios would rather return to fighting piracy by lobbying governments to play whack-a-mole with torrent sites, the streaming company's long-term efforts to abolish or reduce regional licensing blockades could falter this year. This article examines the possible hard choices Netflix must make in appeasing major studios without destroying the user-base that got their attention in the first place. I wonder how long VPN vendors will keep bragging that their services provide worldwide streaming availability, and whether some of them will actually do a decent job of it.
Cutting off Netflix would be cutting off your nose to spite your face--we'd be back to the wild west days where everyone was a pirate by default.
Can't block them all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Lots of good stuff on super-8. It's SUPER!
Will HD and 4K networks need a per user dongle sent out to users who send in REAL ID Act details?
Activation after a call centre makes direct voice contact and tracks the dongle to a US location in real time?
A good VPN could still shield the origins of most of its east and west coast users at the EU and oceania entry points into the USA.
The US exit ip shows up from a US based network a bit further than a network-neutral centre with interconnection services.
Or have the VPN pop up in some fly over state with low taxes, really cheap networking and power costs as part of a massive ip range sold to a walled community.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm not actively trying to bypass their geolimits and apparently my living room, according by google is in sweden and by netflix it's ca, us. No VPN connections in use.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
If a TV network (free to air or pay) has spent the money to buy the local rights to a TV show, the deal they signed with the studios will generally include a clause prohibiting the studio from releasing that show via other means (such as DVDs or streaming) in that country until after the TV network has finished airing it.
I dont have any specific examples but I would be willing to bet that there are shows available on Netflix USA where the rights in other countries are held by someone else. If you can watch those shows on Netflix USA from one of those other countries, the local entity that has the rights will get annoyed with the studio (and so they should given how much they would have paid for exclusive rights)
It was obvious they'd get greedy and do this. Less content for more money is the future.
The TPP and TTIP set up the regulatory frameworks for the IP and media industry to shut down the torrent sites pretty much for good. They won't go after the sites themselves, they'll just keep suing little people into bankruptcy until the rest of them learn to stay away.
The US media companies have spent a lot of money and time setting up the whole TPP and TTIP deal. They weren't doing it for the fun of it. In the future, if you don't have a licence for the stuff your watching, they'll be coming for ya. I think the next step is to 'fix', via some aspect of those agreements, the displays that are sold to the public so that unlicensed media can't be played.
I tire of the entertainment industry trying to force 1950's content ideas on an interconnected world. If you pay for a service you get to use the content. It really is that simple. If I buy a DVD in the US and watch it in Canada it will work fine. Even blue-ray and DVD manufacturers started to advertise region free players. Why should video streaming be any different?
I seem to remember a slew of "entrepreneurs" from the UK being extradited to the US for running online gambling and accepting customers from the US where gambling was illegal.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carruthers
The case against them was that they colluded with banks to accept non-UK credit card payments, specifically US cards.
So the excuse of not knowing the customers were gambling illegally was inadmissible.
Which leaves me wondering why all the talk of Netflix playing the pointless game of IP address whack-a-mole.
Card billing address should suffice.
If Netflix starts accepting bitcoin....
Data caps. I expect that's what keeps Reed Hastings awake at nights. When people expect 4K streams but their ISP charges an arm and a leg for the data in those 4K streams, Netflix becomes less viable.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
then back to ukrainia with you.
Broadcasters are limited by law to only broadcast in a specific area. It's entirely legal for a TV station in Los Angeles to buy a show, and for a different TV station in Paris to get the same show. They aren't colluding to ARTIFICIALLY divide up the market, physics says the antenna broadcast from LA can't be readily received in Paris. That's the physical reality that the entertainment industry is based on. Even NBC, ABC, and other networks only operate in the US. They are American companies, in the business of providing TV to Americans. The reason they aren't broadcasting in Syria isn't because of nefarious collusion, it's because they aren't a Syrian company and aren't organized to broadcast in Syria.
It's the same with physical goods. Certain companies sell groceries in some countries, and other companies operate in other countries. Sometimes, one company in Europe will make an exclusive deal to sell a specific brand name of -laundry soap- in the their area, while another company sells the same brand wherever they operate. Unilever just brought a European soap brand to the US this month, in fact. Unilever isn't avoiding selling it in the Netherlands in order to jack up profits, they simply don't have facilities in the Netherlands. So they bought the rights to use that brand in the area where Unilever operates and noone else is using that brand name.
That made sense for selling anything that requires a local presence, whether it be laundry soap or broadcast TV. Now that digital media is being purchased over the internet in huge amounts the companies will need to refactor their contracts and their ways of doing business.
WTF? Ah it's Timmay...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
That may well be the physical reality of terrestrial broadcast TV, but the same does not apply to Satellite which has a much larger footprint (many european sats can be picked up anywhere from ireland to turkey) and it certainly doesn't apply to internet distribution.
Technology has advanced, the world has changed, its time to drop these obsolete business models.
Physical products are an entirely different beast, as you pointed out not having facilities to produce or import a product is not the same as intentionally withholding it from a particular location. There is nothing stopping a third party from importing the products into another country, and in any country with a significant immigrant population there are companies specialising in importing products from the countries where those immigrants came from because there is a market for their products although it might be too small to interest the original manufacturer.
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Will Netflix ever drop their silly DRM like Apple did?
Companies have tried that with physical goods also - when "region locking" has not been possible manufacturers have tried all kinds of soft tricks (making sure official manuals are not available in many languages to prevent "grey imports" as they call it in one package, placing selling restrictions "suggestions" to retailers to prevent selling to exporters) and not-so soft tricks (refusing to honor warranties on products not imported via "authorized" channels per serial number etc.).
Some practices have been disbanded as being illegal from consumer protection or anti-competitive point of view, some tactics can be still used - the most common being that if use do not honor manufacturers wishes regarding what you sell (you want to import a new product from another country not yet on "official" catalog for your country) or at what prices you can lose all kinds of perks associated with "official" status and suddenly there are all kinds of difficulties getting stuff for resale for you and you have to resort to using "side channels" for all of the inventory of that brand.
Nearly all "luxury brands" from toys (Lego) to fashion (nearly all high-end clothes brands, bags and jewelry, watches) and electronics (camera manufacturers were the traditional bad guys here, I do not know what is the status nowadays with Canon and Nikon, Apple is quite "sensitive" on pricing). The goal here is the same as with TV - selling "exclusive" rights means more money for everybody because margins are higher and prices can be adjusted market by market. The producer also gets control of their brand (only available from X!). They also like to pretend this is a win for consumer (scare-ads of portraying buying from non-official sources as illegal and shady - from "Official" sources you get the best service and genuine product, guaranteed!), but ultimately losers are consumers and retailers who would like to sell as many brands as possible (like Netflix, although they also have their own exclusive production now so they are also a producer...).
Globalization is good!... Except when is bad for *our* bottom line.
Back to torrenting.
I use Netflix for watching straight to DVD/video horror films. In the UK we don't get nearly as many as the US version of Netflix does and I'm happy to pay a few pounds extra a month for a DNS service that lets me change locations after searching for the film I want on one of the numerous Netflix region cataloging sites.
If they implement this I'll simply cancel my subscription and find a decent private torrent site for the kind of movies I'm looking for. I can discover new films each week because whatever algorithm Netflix use is impressively accurate, on films I enjoy because they are good but also films I enjoy despite them being pretty awful. Replicating this will be difficult without getting a lot more misses than hits. I would happily pay to watch these films and have them selected in a similar way but the halfwits at the studios seemingly aren't interested. That's no problem, if they don't want the money I am already paying to someone else, I will just not give it to anyone. By their logic everybody wins! I just wish the people involved in making these decisions would hurry up and die of old age so the rest of the world can get on with normal technological progression.
Then Netflix should actually fix their regional programs. Shows in Canada on CBC are only viewable on U.S Netflix. The Canadian content is pretty lacking, you maybe get an update of new shows/movies once a month. U.S its almost daily.
What f-ing language is that?
If it isn't Netflix, it's first-run movies or tv series. Their precious regioning should have been dismantled over a decade ago. It seems like music is generally available worldwide in a decent amount of time, so why the hold-up for video? Availability should be a requirement of all copyright laws. If you're not gonna sell it someplace, well I guess it's your loss. it's 2016 ffs. if you can't play globally, gtfo.
...
> many european sats can be picked up anywhere from ireland to turkey)
So why would the European satellite TV company want to buy exclusive rights in the United States or Japan / East Asia, where their satellites don't cover? They wouldn't, of course. The physical reality means NBC , DirectTV, or some US company would buy US rights, and the European satellite TV company would buy US rights. Internet distribution is different. How does Netflix bid against the European satellite company? It's apples to oranges.
I'm guessing the sats don't provide GOOD service over an area that big, but it doesn't matter. The point is, they don't service anywhere near the entire world, while Netflix does. It creates a problem.
A lot of IP addresses, and even more IPv6 addresses. Going to be fun to see how well geolocation works with IPv6.
Signed up yesterday in fact, for my chromecast. Now I wonder why anyone uses netflix. I didn't see anything that I wanted to watch. Simpsons - nope, goldrush - nope...(repeat ad nauseum).... Oh they had breaking bad. Star Wars? They have a kids animated version.
Woop de doo.
Maybe there is a hidden button where the good stuff is?
I'm considering dropping them unless I can find something worth while.
Do they have any educational content? Elementary Latin, for example?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This quote shows the faulty thinking.. " appeasing major studios without destroying the user-base that got their attention" Forget the studios. Altogether and focus entirely on the user base. Eventually the Majors will snap out of their "Gordon Gecko" inspired fantasies and realize that while the customer base can get along *just fine* without them, any attempt, conversely, for the Major studios to get by without their customer base leads to death.. i.e. bankrupcy.
Having manuals only available in certain languages is an actual barrier rather than an artificially created one, as it actually costs extra to translate the manual.
That said, products sold in the US will have english and possibly sometimes spanish language manuals, there is no reason these products couldn't be sold in any of the english speaking countries around the world. And even in other countries, many people speak english as a second language if not their first.
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Translation cost is not the issue here, the actual cost is the printing (more pages in more languages cost more, but then again, it also costs extra to print many kinds of different manuals). Deliberately leaving out for an example English (the US is usually not the origin country for imports) is. So:
1) Make sure you leave out English where it is not a major (first) language. Do the same for user interface. This prevents imports from cheaper countries in Asia.
2) If you want to prevent selling to neighboring countries select the languages appropriately. I have seen cases in Finland where an appliance sold in Finland includes manuals and UI translation in Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, but the model sold in Sweden has for an example only Swedish, Danish and Norwegian or the other way around - this combined with selecting which markets you want to sell which model to you can easily create semi-artificial market segmentation.
The point with manuals is nowadays gone because nearly everything is available online, and even printed manuals are now largely universal (my latest purchase, an Onkyo home theater amplifier, had sections "US model" and "Asian model" when describing features), but sometimes manufacturers still play games with localization and target specific countries only with specific models, and buying the better price/value sister model from neighboring country may result in not getting the localization done for your country. You could argue that they are different products, but if the only difference is price, one letter in product number and you can get the translation back by flashing the "universal" firmware makes you wonder what is the real purpose of this "differentation".