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Comment by msravi | Hacker News Reader

And for those outside the US, bittorrent is all you need.

Seriously, I really don't understand - Hollywood is losing a ton by not allowing Hulu and Netflix to screen internationally. They end up pirated anyway - why the US-only restriction? I'm in India and would gladly pay Netflix the $10 fee - but I can't.

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Also, I've recently bought a USB Bluray drive, and I'm really surprised at how hard they made it to play a freaking Bluray movie on a PC. Even the proprietary and expensive software like PowerDVD is crap (does not play every movie). How can they make things this annoying knowing that there's a free alternative (BitTorrent) that always just works?

Can't stress on how true this point is. In Bangalore, India, just a few years back we had maybe 3-4 video rentals in the vicinity (2 - 3 km radius), but now there are none. Unlike the US there aren't any streaming options either. So where are all those users going?

How do you propose the studios which owns the movies satisfy all the laws in India? It may not be possible to get a censor board certificate for each of the movies in the collection of Netflix.

The cost of opening up them to vandalism (if they have offices in India) or lawsuits alleging "hurting the sentiments of the people" is too high.

One reason I use torrents (even though I am willing to pay for good content) is to defeat censorship.

I don't think they need to "operate" in India or anywhere else in the world. They just need to allow people to sign up for their service irrespective of where they're from and access content, just like, you know, how the rest of the internet works.

My guess is that they're being held back more by Hollywood's licensing conditions rather than individual countries' laws.

Unfortunately, distribution networks and related contracts are very complicated legally, not even going into local laws and other legalities. Netflix itself has a few good sized teams of developers dedicated just to creating tooling to help navigate the legal nightmares regarding distribution agreements and their streaming services.

I'm pretty sure the studios would much rather be able to have a very few global release channels than the network remnants they currently have.

Sorry, I don't get it. Are you saying that the studios are forced into this situation because of earlier contracts they've signed with cable networks? Aren't contracts signed separately for each new movie that they create?

There are distribution deals with studios for all distribution to a given location and/or media within different regions. There is some content that is negotiated individually, others en-mass. It is often per-movie, but this only makes things more complicated, not less.

No, Indians cannot sign up for any service irrespective of where it is hosted. If it is illegal, it can be blocked by the government (whether that is just or logical is a different issue, but I am not talking about that here).

Sure, the government can. But that doesn't mean Netflix tries to satisfy the laws of all 196 countries in the world. Netflix is a US company, and they only need to satisfy US laws.

And FYI, viewing of pornography is NOT illegal in India. I will not be breaking any Indian law by viewing a risque movie hosted in the US and streamed by Netflix.

Yeah you can. Various sites like Unotelly offer a way. Different devices in the house can see different content on various services. It's the gold standard. I'm paying for the service so copyright holders can hardly get too mad. If they weren't being dicks they could have the $5 a month I give Unotelly too.

Ok! Didn't know about this. One other VPN I tried (a year or so ago), was real slow and Netflix was unwatchable. They do have a free trial, so will give this a go.

Also try GetFlix.

It's not the exact same thing as the movie rights industry, but check out this series of posts about fiction book publishing: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m... (particularly http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-t...)

As much as I dislike a number of practices in Hollywood, I don't think that the international distribution problem is a consequence of their contractual terms, but on how distribution rights are region-specific, so Hollywood may not be able to grant distribution rights in a market they already gave an exclusive distribution contract to someone else for.

I would love nothing more than for this to be a trivial problem to be solved by negotiating with one (albeit enormous) loose group of companies, but I don't think that's the problem here.

So you're saying that studios sign away all current and future distribution rights for all current and future movies that they create to an exclusive distributor for a particular region? It's not done on a per-movie basis? That is so crazy...

I believe it's on a per-movie basis, but is exclusive for that distribution region (not necessarily one country).

That just makes the problem of getting bulk licenses in multiple locations worse, though.

If you can't get it otherwise, you won't hear me complaining about how you get it. I say get it however you want.

If you're willing to steal movies via torrents, wouldn't you also be willing to get a VPN to watch Netflix?

I'm not a piracy advocate, but this doesn't offer any advantages over torrents. You still don't have a legitimate licence to view the content, so at that stage you might as well just torrent it.

I do not accept the legitimacy of arbitrary region restrictions. It is still the moral thing to do and much faster/easier than torrenting.

It does offer a moral 'advantage' in that you can tell yourself that even though what you are doing isn't technically legitimate, you're at least doing your bit to make sure the creators get paid.

> the creators get paid.

Netflix and the studios* get paid.

And (hopefully) the studios pay the creators. But realistically how is that different from me renting/buying a DVD or buying a ticket at the cinema?

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