Most modern TVs are (if for no other reason then for the reason that you can sell the same model all over the world) very capable of switching between color standards.
That works if you are in Europe. Having moved across to the US from the UK, I've found that it certainly isn't the case here. My HD LCD TV doesn't know what to do with a PAL signal. Luckily, I found a Philips player that will output PAL discs as NTSC with a handset hack.
It was my (most probably mistaken) understanding that region encoding was put in place specifically to control distribution. Because most new films are released in the US before the rest of the world, the film studios wanted to make sure that the rest of the world couldn't see the films before their local release and thereby damage box office returns.
They seem to have "forgotten" that the back catalogues they started to make available are films that had already been released years before. So the region encoding excuse becomes more to do with copyright/distribution rights at that point.
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It was easier in the old days of acoustic modems, when we just whistled into our telephones.
You had telephones ?!?!?
Back in 1998, Kevin Warwick did a similar thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Warwick This led to claims that he was slightly looney :D
It was my (most probably mistaken) understanding that region encoding was put in place specifically to control distribution. Because most new films are released in the US before the rest of the world, the film studios wanted to make sure that the rest of the world couldn't see the films before their local release and thereby damage box office returns.
They seem to have "forgotten" that the back catalogues they started to make available are films that had already been released years before. So the region encoding excuse becomes more to do with copyright/distribution rights at that point.