Hacker News Reader

I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.

View on HN

You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex.

Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.

Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.

It is still an issue because of the way the market is structured. Movies exclusive distribution rights are sold separately to distributors in each country to maximize revenues, in advance if possible. (Or once the movie has toured festivals for independent movies, making it impossible sometimes for years or forever to buy a digital download in one’s country)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com