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Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

> Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere?

Free would be great, but for the BBC I would settle for being able to pay a fair fee for access.

On the whole I dislike the way every company has their own streaming service these days but BBC pretty consistently produces good quality content and they don't focus exclusively on entertainment, their educational shows are actually what I prefer.

I'm no expert but I can think of a couple ideas.

- stop doing exclusive agreements for a region

- explicitly exclude streaming from agreemnets that do region locking

- treat the internet as a new region entirely

Thoughts?

Edit: mobile typos & formatting

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> - treat the internet as a new region entirely

This is actually how the internet work, or at least worked, until the olde guard discovered that it could be used for digital distribution.

Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men.

So what did they do? Did they see the potential this gave them? No, because it didn't match their existing broadcasting licence contracts.

Nope. They did the only thing natural: Instead of changing the contracts, they're trying to change the internet.

Invest everything they could into systems which makes digital distribution painful, less functional, and intentionally delivering all content in incompatible formats not playable by most players and devices (DRMed), and ensure that nobody anywhere any benefits from the new technology, except them.

Why do we even allow them to do this?

If this is how the future is going to work, I might start longing for the 80s again.

I can't wait for these dinosaurs to die. They're ruining this great internet we have here, one bit at a time.

Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men.

This is the part that mystifies me: sacrifice sales to preserve an old model. Oh, I know that the guilty parties don't think they're sacrificing sales because licensing models, blah, blah, blah. And maybe I need to sit down, do the math, and find out they're right. But it'll take some convincing for me to believe that between these two choices: 1. Hey, 7 billion people on the planet, if you have internet access and $5, you can watch this. 2. Hey, Brits, wanna watch a cool show? Tune in tomorrow. 'mericuns? No, we won't be taking your money right now. But we'll take it next year. When? Oh, we don't know, we have some deals to cut first. Okay, we'll take your money now. What? You found something else to occupy your viewing time in those six month? What's that, Costa Rica? No, I don't even see you on the list. Maybe next year.

...#2 makes the most money. While taking little interest in the whole business, were I to guess it's due to fifedoms and entrenched interests. That Costa Rican distributor wants his cut, too.

AFAIK it works like this.

Distributor: You want to bypass me and stream your movies to my country? Help yourself but I won't show your movies in theaters and nobody else will do.

Major: sees a sure immediate loss and a possible future gain. The CEO doesn't take risks and keeps getting the money.

However this leaves the door open for new companies with original content that can't be blackmailed by local distributors. Example: Netflix.

Eventually the majors will bypass distributors when theaters won't be so important anymore. It's going to take time.

> This is the part that mystifies me: sacrifice sales to preserve an old model.

The only one I’m familiar with is BBC America in the US. In this case, they’re “sacrificing sales” so preserve the more profitable model. It’s okay to sacrifice sales if those sales are going to cause you more losses than they’re worth (in this case, networks threatening to drop BBCA)

I think what is particularly frustrating about this model is that the locking applies to content even when you've already paid for access. I am an American expat living in Russia currently, and one of my larger regrets is that I cannot watch the content I legally have access to under Amazon Prime because of geo-locking. Prime's original content is not geo-locked in the slightest, but for any other show, movie, music, or book which I have already paid for access to, I am unable to view it simply because I'm in the wrong IP block.

edit: strangely though, as I just noticed on my FireHD, content I downloaded to the device using PrimeVideo in the US is viewable; it's simply streaming Prime content which is forbidden. The technical difference between a copy sitting in a browser cache that was downloaded in Russia and a copy sitting in the temp storage for the FireHD video player that was downloaded in the US is so insignificant it's baffling that one is allowed and the other isn't. Ultimately, both methods (would) accomplish the same goal; watching a licensed show from Prime in the Russian Federation.

I understand, to a degree, that the reason is a complex web of licensing and distributor agreements. But I feel like these agreements have a very tenuous relationship to streaming content as it differs significantly from the purpose of the original agreements, which was to allow local distributors to profit on the licensed content with localized versions; but that was for an entirely different medium. It's an incredibly weird scenario to me because an agreement over physical media from probably a decade or two ago is preventing me from viewing digital media which wasn't even an option at the time of the original agreements.

There's no extra cost to Amazon to let me watch my stupid shows in St. Petersburg, and as I'm not interested in DVDs/Bluray anyways, it's not as if access to said streams is costing any distributors anything; the "potential sale" was already missed the moment that I got access to the streaming service in the US, both for US distributors and for any foreign distributor.

Individual game companies seem to be able to handle regional distribution even when the economies vary enough to encourage regional pricing; I'm not sure why non-interactive media thinks it cannot do this, or that it would somehow be bad. But it's particularly frustrating that these services, once purchased, work in some places on the planet, but not others, and the only reason is a bunch of agreements made well before the services even existed.

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