I do hope EU gets on top of Apple/Google/Netflix/HBO/etc soon. It's supposed to be One Market, yet these all impose territory restrictions where content in Spain is not necessarily available in France and vice versa.
Note that the issue is rulemaking, not enforcement. The Single Market is a statement of principle, not a legally-applicable regulation, and needs specific rules to be made to put it into effect in different markets.
Well historically individual states had their own regulations regarding weights/measures and product names, and that authority was transferred to the new market when it was created. These types of regulations ensure a level playing field between buyers and sellers, and are an important function of any regulated market. You know what you're getting when you buy a 750 mL bottle of Chateauneuf.
It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory.
True, but the maker of Chateauneuf cannot prohibit a reseller from exporting its products to that territory either. That content-providers have been able to prohibit this, is only because of copyright. And since copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it does follow that the EU can use its monopoly grant to enforce that same single-market principle for digital content.
Exactly. There are some awesome products that I can't buy in the UK, because no-one imports and sells them, that are available in France etc., and vice versa. Of course I'm free to go and buy them myself and bring them back without duty (for the next couple of years at least, after that, on vera).
That's the sticky point from a legal point of view, which needs European legislation and cooperation from all involved parties (investors, producers, distributors, streamers etc) to be resolved. Since the industry benefits from market segmentation though, they are dragging their feet. For example, it's usually better to sell the same film to a different distributor in each country, rather than a single one serving all markets - 28 smaller paydays will often tally up to levels that one single Euro-wide agreement is unlikely to reach; and some films will do well only in certain countries, so might be penalized at EU level.
Or, actually the status quo: if you're a Polish company organising a music festival in Italy you follow Italian law.
That principle won't change just because it's a streaming service, for the obvious reason that anything else would lead to content distributers shopping around for the cheapest jurisdiction.
Regarding the distributers' wish for market segmentation: That's a perfectly understandable reason, and it will become illegal rather soonish. Sure, you can chose you customers. But you won't be able to make their nationality part of the equation much longer.
The public will profit rather obviously. Personally, I don't even care about any changes in pricing. Most annoying are companies segmenting the market along borders, and then never actually signing a local distributor. Or somehow only selling the translated movie etc.
One caveat for practical reasons will be sports rights. It's just not possible to set a single price for, say, the British Premier League games that works everywhere: either it's but a fraction of today's prices, or nobody outside the UK would consider buying a subscription*
* UK example for demonstration purposes only. Will not be implemented. Search for better examples underway.
That's a good example, and that too is a complete mess in the EU at the moment (google vatmess)... Copyright legislation has even more burdensome vagaries to deal with, like identifying authors, owners and distributors (in some countries rights can be alienated, in others they can't, etc etc) and get approval from all parties. This is why streaming services are so slow to expand in the European market.
> market segmentation: [...] will become illegal rather soonish.
That's a very optimistic view. Creators have very powerful lobbies, even the most heart-hardened bureaucrat will melt at the prospect of spending a few hours with Charlize Theron or Mick Jagger.
I'm not confident at all they'll be able to completely ban geoblocking in one go. Hopeful they will at least poke some holes in it this round. Most parts of the single market needed a couple of revisions of a directive (quite a few years removed) before liberalizing a particular market fully..
It certainly has lowered my blood pressure–he's now in a much more important position. But that means that people will actually stop him if he continues to embarrass himself in the way he previously did.
There'll be exceptions for sports broadcasts, and maybe other content where there is a reason legitimising a difference in prices. For example: a french 24h news channel may be worth 20 Euro in France, but is more of an "yeah, all right, why not" buy for someone in Austria trying to freshen up his language skills.
Are French newspapers also suddenly a lot cheaper when sold in Austria? Of course not. They're more expensive in fact, because of transport and the cost of stocking a relatively unpopular item.
Now, these two costs don't matter for digital/streaming media. So imagine that they are negligible for French newspapers, too. Would they be sold in Austria for super-cheap, with just a slim margin on the price of paper they're printed on? I kind of expect the price to be roughly the same, actually.
The only reason that digital/streaming media get to pretend to be "different" is because they started out with the technological means to enforce market segmentation before regulation got wind of it. And that ability is incredibly profitable, to the detriment of the consumer. Which is why we regulate it. And now they don't want to give back something they really didn't have any right to in the first place.
Note that I'm not claiming either side of whether these streaming media should be the expensive local price everywhere, or the cheap everywhere-else price. Just that the fact that the market value of something differs extremely between regions, is an argument for regulation of market segmentation, not against.
I do hope the EU gets on top of Content Owners soon. In my time at Netflix, we often worked hard to negotiate global content deals; however, it's far more lucrative for the content owners to sell for each market individually. I suspect that the other players in this space feel the same way; all of them are held hostage by the content owners.
It will be unreasonably difficult and just not worth it to track down and negotiate with all the various the owners for each territory for most older titles.
Annoyingly I can't find the link, but IIRC the BBC originally looked into making everything it had ever made in its giant archives available to stream. Even for the content the BBC produced and owned internally, which is a huge amount, they determined it simply wasn't possible to offer the full BBC back catalog all the time on their service - tracking down the various rights holders, actors, and other parties to the content to renegotiate for streaming was an impossible undertaking. A real shame - a readily accessible public database of all of the BBC's content would have been incredible, especially when so much of it was paid for by UK tax payers.
The last Labour government in 2010 was looking at options to legislate to absolve the BBC of these responsiblities, but sadly it didn't go anywhere. This is absolutely a problem that will need legal changes to fix for old content, realistically.
It is a weird idea to steal art from people and force them to sell it to others.
And considering that companies don't have any moral rights, you need to proof that affording them such power positively affects actual people.