Is there a rational reason for region locking?

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well they will as distribution goes 100% digital over time.

Unfortunately, digital distribution does not mean an end to region locking. Australia pays more for video game downloads, and local Netflix, coming soon, will charge more too. There has been a government inquiry into this stuff recently, with corporations including Google and Apple attending, but I suspect its verdict will be toothless...

No it's vested interests too like Murdoch who DID NOT want the NBN as that would have hurt Foxtel. People like him is why we have the "netflix tax"

You do realize it was because of his newspapers that the last election was helped greatly for Abbott. Worst govt. we have had in years.

And media with no balls to call them out on all the nonsense they are doing but this is not the thread for that.

 

[eyeresist]

^ I would rather think about Star Trek than those bastards. As a guy in Trekkies 2 said, "When reality stops being so lame, we'll stop doing this."

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

^ I would rather think about Star Trek than those bastards. As a guy in Trekkies 2 said, "When reality stops being so lame, we'll stop doing this."

I could not agree more

 

[MacLeod]

Well they will as distribution goes 100% digital over time. Netflix already wants to become global, but is encountering resistance from their content suppliers.

But you must remember that Netflix doesn't exist in every country, and to expect every company to be global and capable of doing business globally is unrealistic. It's a big world, but it isn't one world. Each country is always going to have businesses that operate there, but not elsewhere, that isn't going to change.

Will distribution ever go 100% digital? Sure it might go 95% digial but I suspect that there will always be a market for physical. For example I could still by a vinyl record today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30216638

 

[SPCTRE]

The physical aspects of (media) distribution will become more and more of a niche collector's market with decent margins but overall relatively inconsequential volume.

The question in the OP has already been answered, economical reasons. Different markets have differing buying power characteristics, exchange rates are still a thing, and licensing deals tend to be limited by conventional (non-transnational) regions that don't reflect the realities of, you know, the internet.

 

[cultcross]

Well they will as distribution goes 100% digital over time.

Unfortunately, digital distribution does not mean an end to region locking.

Quite - the different catalogues available to Netflix UK and US users are testament to that.

It is, to my mind, a frustrating legacy of the era when a US movie would come out, the US DVD would come out, then maybe, a month or so later, a UK cinema might release the movie, and over two years after the US theatrical release, we'd get a UK DVD. The changing market (and I suspect piracy concerns) have largely brought an end to that, but the region locking is still with us. The best reason for that is, as others have said, the industry of selling media content is complicated. Not every business is global (in fact very few are truly global in their pure form), which means they need local contracts to distribute in those areas, and those contracts aren't going to be worth much if big retailers like Amazon can ship in foreign content and undercut them.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well they will as distribution goes 100% digital over time.

Unfortunately, digital distribution does not mean an end to region locking.

Quite - the different catalogues available to Netflix UK and US users are testament to that.

It is, to my mind, a frustrating legacy of the era when a US movie would come out, the US DVD would come out, then maybe, a month or so later, a UK cinema might release the movie, and over two years after the US theatrical release, we'd get a UK DVD. The changing market (and I suspect piracy concerns) have largely brought an end to that, but the region locking is still with us. The best reason for that is, as others have said, the industry of selling media content is complicated. Not every business is global (in fact very few are truly global in their pure form), which means they need local contracts to distribute in those areas, and those contracts aren't going to be worth much if big retailers like Amazon can ship in foreign content and undercut them.

I find piracy a bullshit excuse

 

[Pingfah]

Well they will as distribution goes 100% digital over time. Netflix already wants to become global, but is encountering resistance from their content suppliers.

But you must remember that Netflix doesn't exist in every country, and to expect every company to be global and capable of doing business globally is unrealistic. It's a big world, but it isn't one world. Each country is always going to have businesses that operate there, but not elsewhere, that isn't going to change.

Will distribution ever go 100% digital? Sure it might go 95% digial but I suspect that there will always be a market for physical. For example I could still by a vinyl record today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30216638

Well, there are unique reasons why vinyl still sells, it is a totally different technology, you cannot digitally distribute content that is specifically supposed to be analogue. I forsee a future where Vinyl is the ONLY hard format for distributing music, and CDs have been entirely replaced by the internet.

Films and TV will go as near to 100% digital as matters eventually, the only thing holding the market back from that is the infrastructure for delivering data globally is not anywhere near robust enough to shift the amounts of data we would be talking about. Eventually they simply won't bother creating new hard formats at all for distributing forthcoming formats of film & TV entertainment, as the development costs for the tech won't be worth it for the tiny numbers of people who will still want to own it in a hard format.

 

[cultcross]

Unfortunately, digital distribution does not mean an end to region locking.

Quite - the different catalogues available to Netflix UK and US users are testament to that.

It is, to my mind, a frustrating legacy of the era when a US movie would come out, the US DVD would come out, then maybe, a month or so later, a UK cinema might release the movie, and over two years after the US theatrical release, we'd get a UK DVD. The changing market (and I suspect piracy concerns) have largely brought an end to that, but the region locking is still with us. The best reason for that is, as others have said, the industry of selling media content is complicated. Not every business is global (in fact very few are truly global in their pure form), which means they need local contracts to distribute in those areas, and those contracts aren't going to be worth much if big retailers like Amazon can ship in foreign content and undercut them.

I find piracy a bullshit excuse

I mean that the existence of piracy has at least in part forced the end of the huge delays between US and UK releases over the last decade. When we used to have to wait for a TV show for months if not years, it was openly inviting people to find some other way of watching it. I don't mean that piracy was a reason for region coding - it is very clear that it has no effect at all because on the internet it is relatively easily circumvented.

Well, there are unique reasons why vinyl still sells, it is a totally different technology, you cannot digitally distribute content that is specifically supposed to be analogue. I forsee a future where Vinyl is the ONLY hard format for distributing music, and CDs have been entirely replaced by the internet.

I agree - digital content will find a 100% digital marketplace, and the only physical content left will be analogue. There is little point in stamping out onto a physical medium something which is perfect for distribution over the internet - there is a lot of point in physically recording something analogue.