Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yup. Netflix gains nothing from this. They get a subscription for about $10 for a streaming account no matter where you are (at least from what I've seen, they aren't discounted greatly in poorer countries). So if they block VPNs, they'll lose subscribers (thus income). And the studios will lose because those who cancel will fall back to piracy. Only if the studios think they can win against piracy would they think this is a good idea. Do they still think they can win against piracy?
The Netflix model should run like iTunes. I'm multi-national in iTunes. My US account uses a US address and US credit card. My non-US account uses non-US card and address. I can play from both anywhere in the world. I can download to/from both anywhere in the world. The account is billing linked, not location linked. Netflix should move to a similar fashion, and the studios clamp down on international transactions from US addresses as a money laundering and stop worrying about where someone is, but where their money comes from. Works for iTunes (who has lots of content), and much easier than region coding things based on IP of the user.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Fun, google is reporting I'm in Norway and "netflix is not available at your location." I'm sitting ~170km outside of Toronto, in Ontario. Geoblocking is garbage, the only thing it does is push people to piracy.
Om, nomnomnom...
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)
Basically this is a bit like saying, ``We'll divide up the city. You sell your stuff in the north an west. We will sell in the south and east.'' Isn't that kind of collusion and market manipulation supposed to be illegal?
Put another way, suppose Walmart.com purchased the rights from Amazon to serve your particular state exclusively and then jacked up their prices a bit? Is that right?
Of course IP rights makes things arbitrarily more complex, but do they really have to be? I'm just not convinced that arbitrarily limiting competition is a good thing. Of course international packets likely run on more expensive infrastructure. It might be necessary to pay your isp more money if those are heavily used, so they can pass it on..
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!
Why would you accept that you can see different content based on your location? You wouldn't accept Wikipedia or news sites to return different content shaped by your government based on your location? There is no reason that Netflix can't sell their services in other markets, you wouldn't want your business' customers to be artificially limited by the government?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
TPP and TTIP should have shut all that down. Sell content in the US? Then it's available in all the T*P countries. That's what "free trade" is about. Not using "free trade" agreements to further restrict trade.
Learn to love Alaska
The whole region restricting scheme is just stupid and is much like the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 20's - it feeds crime.
Add to it that it also discriminates - you can't bring movies with you that's only available in your home country if you live in another country in another region.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Not only is this not illegal, this is how it's been done as far back as there have been TV shows and movies. But it is also done with books, music, video games and board games, computer software, and so on. It the US, the markets are as small as major cities. So a TV station in LA pays for rights to Seinfeld and another station in San Francisco pays again, perhaps not even the same price. This goes on across the US in city after city. And TBS pays for a national cable license.
And in the end you get the program sales copy bragging about how the show has been cleared in 9 of the 10 top markets and 45 of the top 50, plus countries. Add to that streaming services around the world -Netflix isn't the only such streaming company.
The bottom line is that the companies who make this stuff have an interest in getting as many separate buyers to pay as much as possible for every single piece.
It's been this way forever. It isn't going to change now because untold sums of money are vested in keeping it the way it is. Just as an example, back in the day Carsey-Warner made well over $1 billion dollars selling reruns of Roseanne to TV stations around the US. Each station paid up to millions of dollars PER episode. Likewise, reruns of the Cosby show sitcom (once THE powerhouse show, hard as that may be to believe now) also went for in excess of a billion dollars.
Now, there is no way a Netflix or anyone else can possibly top that kind of money. Why should a Carsey-Warner settle for a percentage of that money from Netflix when they can get it all? Do you know how many salespeople made huge commission off that, and how many TV stations were able to sell massive amounts of commercial time on those shows? If you want to be on Cosby, you gotta buy a whole package of ads to run around the clock, you see,
Syndication isn't that valuable any more in the US but there is still a lot of money in it outside the US.
Sig for hire.