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Comment by idlern | Hacker News Reader

>That’s especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic. One major reason for BitTorrent’s rising popularity? Annoying exclusivity streaming deals.

In my country you can't even watch Netflix exclusives on Netflix because they already sold the rights to local TVs. So you sign up for Netflix and it's a wasteland of 2nd tier movies and old series. Yeah Friends is cool but who cares about it in 2019.

Segmentation is the biggest problem. But that's true for every digital store not just Netflix. I wish these stores were one unfied thing not US Netlix, German Netflix, UK Netflix etc.

I know it comes down to copyright laws and such but the difference between the countries is soooo big. Feels like you are signing up for a 3rd tier service for the same amount of money

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This has been a problem for a long time with media. For some time, we've been perfectly capable of delivering globally. They don't want to do this, because the money gets made through a calculated release process. They want to maximize revenue on this extremely expensive asset, and there are strategic / logistical concerns.

On side note, I think there's a bit of a "look at this awesome thing you can't have" aspect to IP and content; this can be very frustrating, and has been one of the main reasons people turned to piracy (mostly people are just jerks though). There's actually some very understandable reasons why you'd want, or even need to carefully release in each region; however in other cases the attitude seems to be "we haven't figured out how to monetize this, so I guess no one gets it", "we'll need you to buy that again", or "you can't have this, because we want you to buy something else"

> There's actually some very understandable reasons why you'd want, or even need to carefully release in each region

Please, do tell.

I'd be happy to! Lots of strategic, logistical, and legal stuff. The obvious thing is that I can't release a movie if it's gonna get banned. So you may need to make tweaks or campaign for a different rating / classification. It helps to be proactive and get ahead of these things. Cultures are different and you need to account for that.

Then there's marketing. You need only look at examples like Blair Witch, or "Blumhouse Films" (eg. Paranormal Activity, The Purge), to see what marketing and word of mouth can do for a movie. Of course you'd like to see a bit of that magic (this explains why so many movies are marketed as "reality" / found footage), but in any case, you want to optimize the hype and buzz around a movie. This is a whole skillset, that may differ by culture, and can make or break a film. We're talking about millions of dollars here.

Now none of those things interest me personally. I don't "like them". I definitely don't like restrictions by region. However saying: "they have it in their country, why don't I have it yet?" is a bit like saying "they've made a final cut of the film, why can't I watch it yet?". They have this incredibly expensive asset that they're trying to maximize revenue on.

logistical for digital goods should be a nonissue.

to my knowledge, legal stuff should in most cases be a nonissue as well. They could put everything behind the oldest age bracket (18/21 yrs old), which would probably be their biggest customerbase anyway. and if they did that, its gonna be the responsibility of the account owner.

the only reason that actually holds up is strategic. They do want to milk all brands to their maximum after all... but if thats the reason, they don't really have any grounds to complain about piracy.

This is coming from somebody who hasn't watched any TV/Movies in ~3 yrs now, because i didn't want to pirate and netflix / amazon video didn't have enough content i wanted to watch.

> to my knowledge, legal stuff should in most cases be a nonissue as well.

Why? I'm confused at how that could be the case; it's a big issue for most businesses.

> They could put everything behind the oldest age bracket (18/21 yrs old), which would probably be their biggest customerbase anyway.

You simply can't do this when the entire film is banned. This is also bad from a purely business perspective. Even if it's the biggest customerbase, it's a limiting factor which lowers the number of customers that can see it (this is mostly implicit, not legally enforced in the USA). Sadly, many films are being re-cut or re-written, so that they won't receive an R rating (definitely not the dreaded NC-17). That's why we have things like John McClain saying "dagg nabbit" and "gollie gee", instead of swearing.

> They do want to milk all brands to their maximum after all...

You put this far better than I did. Very succinct and descriptive.

> but if thats the reason, they don't really have any grounds to complain about piracy

You lost me here. These brands aren't cheap; lots of money goes into them. Businesses want as much money as possible, especially given the high cost and risk. I'm not a big IP fan, but it is their property. Saying I stole from you, because I don't like the way you sell things, and you have no grounds to complain isn't completely reasonable (DRM is the most legitimate gripe I have, but it's still not a perfect excuse). I appreciate your commitment to doing the right thing. Sorry for the dissection, I didn't intend for this to be rebuttal, but it kinda got away from me.

The rating is only required if you want your content on cable TV or want to advertise with the official age requirement brandings to my knowledge.

Platforms like Vimeo couldn't exists if it were an actual requirement for all video content.

And no, it's not a limiting factor. You're losing 100% of your customers if you don't stream at all in other nations. Even 10% is more than 0%. There are of course political movies that can, theoretically get the content banned in some countries. These are beyond rare in first world countries however, making this a non-issue for almost everything as well.

Finally: piracy is not theft. It never was and never will be. It is at best lost revenue and more likely not even that, as most people wouldn't have bought the content anyway. Ask the people that stopped downloading their content if they started buying the stuff instead... Almost everyone I know just gave up on it entirely.

Hey, thanks for the followup. Right now, in the USA, ratings are extremely important. Theoretically, it's illegal for the government to restrict cable, Vimeo, streaming, ect. Only public airwaves are actually regulated (you can get fines/punishment for indecency on broadcast TV / radio). For everything else, it's the land of the free.

The problem is industry conventions, which might seem self-inflicted, but are the result of public criticism. It's legal to show porn on cable, but most stations still heavily self-censor. NC-17 / Unrated movies won't be play in many theaters, or sell in big stores. You simply can't make a very successful NC-17 film in the USA. R rated movies make substantially less money, to the point that they've been trying to make less of them. I can't speak for other countries, but I'm pretty sure they censor, or have similar ratings that are avoided. Lots of stuff you dismiss as a "non-issue" seem like pretty big issues to me.

> However saying: "they have it in their country, why don't I have it yet?" is a bit like saying "they've made a final cut of the film, why can't I watch it yet?". They have this incredibly expensive asset that they're trying to maximize revenue on.

IMO it's very clear they are overdoing it. And their profits suffer from it. Nobody in that area likes losing business to torrents. But they keep pushing their luck and the result is very predictable.

> Lots of strategic, logistical, and legal stuff.

This goes exactly as well as "I want 2 months to refactor stuff so the code is beautiful". Not saying it's the same thing -- but it gets perceived the same. Basically: "lawyer crap".

These businesses are losing touch with reality. Distribution and geofencing are artificially created problems. This gives them much less credibility compared to the very simple and logical desire for convenience that the wide public exercises by going for torrents.

In the long run this sounds like the kind of area that begs for regulation. If you run a subscription service you have strong market power over competing content producers who can't do the same and create their own distribution channels. This gives the monopolist strong leverage to purchase content on the cheap and expand their platform to the detriment of other distributors, which is precisely what Netflix is doing, using their economies of scale to discourage consumers to seek alternate offers.

It seems sensible to force platforms with significant market power to open up and allow competing content to be sold on there too, maybe on a basis of costs-plus-fixed-profit for the platform.

From what I understand, "Netflix Original" means two different things:

1) Things that are actually Netflix's shows, like House of Cards

2) Things that Netflix bought exclusive distribution rights for in the US and markets as "Original" just like House of Cards, but actually had nothing to do with.

So it's less that Netflix sold the rights to local TVs and more that they never had those rights to begin with.

And that means that Netflix exclusives can go off the air due to poor TV viewership. Dirk Gently, you were gone too soon.

Is Dirk Gently gone from Netflix?! It's one of the best things there.

I thought I still saw it listed recently. Maybe it's only gone from your region and not mine, in which case I recommend a VPN.

It's still there, but because the BBC didn't get a lot of traction with it in the UK they canceled further seasons.

I frankly was surprised to even see a season 2. Season 1 was brilliant, but it didn't seem possible to do a follow up that wouldn't be lame. I was wrong, but I'm still happy we got these two seasons. I imagine it's pretty hard to keep up this level of weirdness.

It's on Hulu.

In some countries (I think Australia was one of them) Netflix did sell the distribution rights to House of Cards before they entered the market and then couldn't show House of Cards on Netflix once they did enter the market.

In Netherland, The Expanse used to be a Netflix Original, while in the US it was on SyFy. But this "Netflix Original" appeared on Netflix half a year after it had aired on SyFy. And of course now that Amazon bought all rights to The Expanse from SyFy, this "Netflix Original" vanished from Dutch Netflix.

"Netflix Original" clearly doesn't mean much. I think it'd be wiser for Netflix to reserve it for shows they actually own, so they can never disappear from Netflix.

Also

3) Joint productions like Lilyhammer where Netflix partnered with a foreign broadcaster to produce.

So something like Lilyhammer that was a joint Netflix/NRK production means it's a Netflix Original in the US and aired on NRK1 in Norway, but it's actually produced by both companies.

I was extremely surprised to learn one of what I thought was Netflix's first original shows is not in fact owned by them: Orange is the New Black. According to this piece on Netflix's general problem (https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18166911/netflix-friend...), it is actually owned by Lionsgate, and I assume Netflix has an exclusive distribution deal.

In Germany "House of Cards" was shown first on Sky and only months later available on Netflix ...

> Segmentation is the biggest problem. But that's true for every digital store not just Netflix.

The effect in TFA only really happens with fixed-cost, apl-you-can-eat offerings. (Amazon Prime is another.)

It's why people groused for years about a la carte cable, but nobody cares about McDonald's not serving Pizza Hut.

Amazon Prime isn't fixed cost though - anything remotely worth watching on there costs extra.

I'm not paying £7.99 on top of my existing subscription just to watch a 30-year-old movie I've already seen 15 times.

I recently tried a free month trial on Amazon Prime because it looked like they had Good Omens. They only had the trailer and very little else. There's a cute kids' show that my youngest son loves, but I don't think we're going to extend this trial.

> anything remotely worth watching on there costs extra.

Sorry, I just meant to refer to Prime free shipping. That was super ambiguous of me.

Agreed, the selection is pretty terrible. Seems to be where terrible movies go to die.

I had a pretty high opinion of HBO from decades ago, tons of premium movies etc. I got a few months free from comcast and was surprised how little content there was.

> So you sign up for Netflix and it's a wasteland of 2nd tier movies and old series

Same thing in my country (United States).

I believe the EU is about to forbid geo-blocking.

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