Hacker News Reader

Comment by photonios | Hacker News Reader

I got all excited and then realized that almost none of the new services that were announced will offer me anything as a European.

Apple Card most likely won't be coming to Europe any time soon. The streaming service is also not likely to come to Europe as it includes US-only services such as Hulu and Amazon Prime.

I am aware that this is a bit of a 1st world problem, but all of these services being US-only can be really annoying. Recently I tried to legally stream Battlestar Galatica in Europe. Not available on Netflix or HBO. So I figured I can rent the show from iTunes. Nope, only in the US. How about Amazon Prime? Nope. US only. In the end, I pirated it from one of the private torrent trackers we have here. I was willing to pay and watch it legally. But aside from ordering the blu-ray discs, I had no choice. Wanna keep piracy alive? This is how you do it.

I do understand why these services are not _yet_ available in Europe. It doesn't make it less annoying though.

View on HN

This entire field is completely messed up. One of my favorite movies this year is from India, I don't usually see Bollywood movies but Manikarnika rocked. It opened in January and now, it's been out on Amazon Prime since Saturday:

https://www.justwatch.com/ca/search?q=manikarnika

In Canada.

In the USA?

https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=manikarnika

Not so much.

This only drives piracy -- it obviously has been ripped and it is available on torrent.

Other side of the coin, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to watch American Gods and it takes more than 24 hours for the latest episode to get to Canada from the USA. It is literally faster to drive across the border, record it and drive back. That's insane. Oh and there's no indication of when it drops. People posted the question for UK and there's simply no answer.

I honestly can say, I tried to move away from piracy -- I have been pirating things since 1985 -- but when I look at https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1110254374192889857 and the availability, I despair and just want to give up. I have the money but having all of these are just annoying. Every service has its own interface and problems. Like, you can't Chromecast Amazon Prime unless you cast the browser tab and that sucks quality wise. And yes, quality! Amazon Prime is not always 1080p but what I torrent is always 1080p and never degrades. Netflix is better quality wise for sure, it was the first I subscribed to watch their Marvel stuff... but I am really not keen on having eventually eight or a dozen different services to search when I just want to watch a movie and deal with the quirks of each.

Piracy is a service problem and these guys are making the service worse and worse every day.

Ps. try searching Roku stick on Amazon.ca , the first result is "Roku® Streaming Stick | Portable, power-packed player with voice remote with TV power and volume | US version – Not intended for use in Canada".

Totally true. This is why I got excited for Apple TV+ for a minute. A single interface to access to all of these services is totally worth my money.

I often thought about building something like this, but always came to the conclusion that the potential legal problems are not worth it. justwatch.com is a life saver when it comes to figure out where to get the content from. +1 for justwatch.com!

> This is why I got excited for Apple TV+ for a minute. A single interface to access to all of these services is totally worth my money.

No way Disney and Netflix and Amazon Prime will give their programming to Apple.

They already do. Apple TV app happily shows me Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc etc content for me to watch. Their suggestions on things to watch also include content only accessible from those services. My Netflix and Hulu (and HBO and others) are even billed to me via iTunes too, so this isn’t a huge shift in reality. Almost everything but the more polished UI (and not needing to wait on the provider’s app to load, looking at you Hulu with your terribly slow app) is available today in fact.

Sports is even worse, wanna watch the game for your favorite sport? Gotta have that one special subscription! That shit thrives on exclusivity deals. (Super Bowl ads, anyone?)

When I lived in the UK I signed up for an out-of-market subscription for NHL, it was something like $50 and I could watch any game from any broadcast (they always do a home and away broadcast) and they’d block out most of the ads because it was out of market and they hadn’t sold the ads there. Now the UK does air some nhl games, particularly during the playoffs, so how’d I do it? Used a vpn in like Peru or somewhere that wouldn’t give two craps about hockey. I paid for it, but still had to jump through hoops to watch it. What I time to be alive.

Whoever figures out the Netflix of sports, wins. I’m calling it.

> I paid for it, but still had to jump through hoops to watch it. What I time to be alive.

When I travel in the EU, several sites refuse to show because of GDPR. My favorite paid porn site doesn't even explain anything just goes to an "under maintenance" page. I can't buy a cinema ticket for the time when I'll be home because the purchase page simply doesn't load. All of this goes away by SSH'ing to my home and using the OpenSSH SOCKS proxy. Or by using a VPN.

Australia has (maybe? mostly?) figured this out with a subscription service called Kayo.

It is $15 a month and contains basically every sport my friends who like sports watch.

I'm looking forward to seeing it collapse into a pile of garbage when the governing bodies of various sports catch on and try to "extract value" from streaming.

The "available sports" on Kayo: https://help.kayosports.com.au/s/article/What-content-is-ava...

? It's available on Amazon Prime in the US. In Hindi, Tamil 7 Telugu. With English subtitles. Smart TVs these days allow Amazon Prime so why would try Chromecasting from your computer?

Some people (like myself) refuse to trust the typically poor security practices of Smart TV manufacturers and never connect them to the internet.

Or better yet, try to purchase the few remaining non “smart” TVs or have started using computer monitors instead of TVs to get a TV smaller than 40” and without smart TV garbage in it.

Is it? Justwatch doesn't find it. That's odd.

I would assume that Apple Card isn’t coming to Europe because Europe doesn’t permit credit cards to charge merchants the insane fees that fund rewards cards in the US.

(I bet that if regulations changes and merchants started passing on fees in a transparent manner to customers, then rewards cards would go away in the US. How exciting would 2% back be if you also paid an extra 2% directly to each merchant for the privilege of using the cash back card?)

Aren't merchants typically charged 3%?

In the USA, yes most folks pay around 3%, but it gets lower when the card is physically present, aka swiped.

Now the EU has limited the Interchange Fee paid by EU merchants by an order of magnitude:

>For card payments carried out by the cardholder in a shop ("Card Present Transactions"):

> 0.2% of the value of the transaction for debit cards;

> 0.3% of the value of the transaction for credit cards:

>For online payments ("Card Not Present Transactions"):

> 1.15% of the value of the transaction for debit cards;

> 1.50% of the value of the transaction for credit cards.

Source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-6655_en.htm

And yet there are cards that offer 1 or 2% cashback in the UK - are these simply funded by the banks as a way to tempt users to sign up?

if they're banking on a large percentage being online transactions, then the 1% could be covered or exceeded. Additionally, if they even break even on `transaction fees - cash back` then they make money on interest whenever someone can't/doesn't pay in full every month

Most people miss the point that for a rewards card to pay you. You have to pay off the balance every month. And missing that by even a single month at 10%-21% interest that you get charged. You are more then likely to loose money even with the rewards.

Don't know where you are in Europe, but usually there are a few offers available from quite a lot of providers. Here are Ireland and Germany:

https://www.justwatch.com/ie/tv-series/battlestar-galactica https://www.justwatch.com/de/Serie/Battlestar-Galactica

Fully agree though on feeling like a second-class citizen regarding a number online services.

The more west you go, the better it gets :-) justwatch.com doesn't even have a page for Romania [1]; 404 Not Found.

[1] https://www.justwatch.com/ro/Serie/Battlestar-Galactica

Europe... Now imagine living in a third-world country. At least I can use torrents without any worries.

Some people are mentioning regulation but for streaming a lot of it comes down to market size. The US is a huge singular market which all speaks one language. In europe there are many smaller markets each with its own language and set of countries and regulations. Even at big-ish US companies that serve europe, there might only be a small team that services just FR or just GB, and almost never any smaller countries.

On the plus side, that gap presents sort of a business opportunity but the downside is, it's not a particularly big one.

This is totally true. As I mentioned in my first comment, I do understand the reason.

Doing business in the EU is just a lot harder. Even though a lot of regulation is on an EU level, each country has their own rules and laws on top of that. Just invoicing your customers is a total mess. It's incredibly complicated. Then there is a ton of privacy and data protection regulation (GDPR for example). Germany for example has a dozen or so more rules on top of that. It's one of the reasons why Google Streetview is non-existent in Germany. I haven't even gotten to the the fact that each country has a different language. Although most people of younger generations do speak and understand English just fine.

I totally understand why companies avoid the EU as a result of this. It's a mess. Ironically, I do support a lot of these regulations.

somehow Netflix is available in majority of europe with english-only content and it’s fine. sometimes you can get subtitles even. so I don’t think that it is main reason why europe is second-class citizen in this regard.

The language might not be the biggest problem. The insane amount of regulation we have might be. Besides regulation, there are plenty of other differences between countries within the EU.

For example, we don't have a unified banking system in the EU. Each country has its own preferred method of payment. In the Netherlands they have iDeal. In Belgium Bancontact. Dankort in Denmark. The list goes on [1]. Credit cards are not that common in Europe and not everyone has one. To appeal to a wider audience, one must support local payment methods. This is just one example of where things get more complicated compared to doing business in the US.

[1] select the "Europe" tab: https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods

You can pay with a SEPA payment within EU from one account to another in another country, as if making a transfer within a country.

Basically all you need is the IBAN.

The currency will be converted to euro but you don't need to be within the eurozone, only within EU.

This is true. The banking infrastructure within the European Union is really good compared to the US.

The example I gave was regarding accepting online payments as a business from inviduals and other businesses. For US busineses, accepting credit cards is usually enough. Large bills can be paid by wire transfer. In the EU, accepting online payments is not that straightforward. Just figuring out the right VAT rate is complicated to begin with.

See: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/eu-vat-ru...

I think for things like streaming language isn't the issue but existing content exclusivity deals are.

It is true that there is a lot of diversity in local payment methods, but you can easily cover most of your potential customers by simply offering credit/debit card, bank transfer and paypal options. It's more than enough to get you started.

As for the supposed insane amount of regulation, the majority of international trade is regulated at the EU level so it's quite unified. Not to mention e-commerce which is completely regulated by the EU.

I am not saying that there is not a considerable amount of particularity that may be hindering small startups in fast expansion across Europe but I would find it quite hard to believe that it is much of a factor for the likes of Apple and Amazon.

I've been blocked from shows "not available in the US", so it's not just a European issue. It's just a copyright thing.

More of a licensing deal thing. Someone has the rights to distribute the show, it's just that it's really not clear who/how/where to get it. That or the price is so inflated that it's really not worth it.

We have the same problem here in Australia.

I'm surprised you're not used to it by now.

It's much easier to launch new ventures in the US due to considerably less regulation.

I'm reasonably sure that the parent commenter's problem is more about licensing than regulation.

source? because it sounds like that’s an unfounded knee jerk reaction that’s not backed up by fact. there are lots of factors that contribute to fewer enterprises in the EU, and i’m not sure that regulation is anywhere near the top for the majority of cases

Apple TV+ was announced for "100+ Countries at Launch".

but the content won’t likely be the same across regions. netflix for example has a very different library depending on where you are in the world. eg CANADA had about 50% of the US library in 2016 (many other regions sitting with UK/AU around 30-40%)

... but it still costs the same, and that’s not even the part that’s frustrating

Apple owns the rights to apple content. As Netflix does to most of their original content. So their original stuff will most likely launch international. What Europe won't get is all the channels cause those might have different plans for different markets. Disney already talked about an international launch of Hulu and most of the HBO and Showtime stuff is on Sky in some European markets which has TV app integration already.

So no we won't have the exactly same stuff but most of it will end up there one way or another (except Netflix)

I doubt that very much. They've pretty strongly implied that Apple TV+ is just Apple original content, not like Netflix or Amazon where its a mix of Originals and licensed content. If they own the content, they can distribute it wherever they want.

When it comes to original content - and that's the main appeal of Apple TV+ - I'm confident that Apple understands that staggered releases aren't really an option these days. Netflix releases their originals at the same time in most markets. I'd expect Apple to do the same.

The access to third-party content (or lack thereof) isn't in Netflix' hands. That's basically the reason why they double down on their very own originals.

I see the primary benefits of the Apple Card being Security & Privacy. Doesn't the EU already have more secure CCs with better privacy?

Security, yes. Privacy—I don't believe so*

*—though it depends what you mean by 'better'. I don't think anything existing int the EU is as secure and as private as what Apple just announced. For sure the average EU CC is more secure than an average US one and our data protection laws are better. However our credit cards are still allowed to track us and our purchases. Credit agencies still follow us around and rate us. Getting hold of our histories is relatively simple but removing ourselves from those histories is less so.

TV+ will be available in 100 countries at launch.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/apple-unveils-apple-t...

If you used Apple pay, you can even get less excited. Because since today, Apple is now a competitor for banks.

Perhaps they are too big too fail in America, but I'm pretty sure they are not in Europe and other countries. And those partnerships with banks are probably going to cease to exist.

I get Amazon Prime Video in Holland.

Lucky you! I am from the Netherlands, but not presently living there. Maybe I should sign up with my Dutch credit card and put my parents address.

Thanks for the tip!

Amazon Prime Video is a worldwide service: https://www.primevideo.com

Content varies by region, though, of course.

And naturally nowhere do they tell you need to use primevideo.com instead of amazon.com as an international customer.

Thanks for the heads up. I signed up for the 7 day free trial. There are some good shows. I guess I'll keep it for a few months so i can binge watch those shows.

Very little sci-fi shows though.

The Expanse is on there which is more than a good enough reason to keep it ;)

We all get Prime Video in Europe, but the problem is that much of the content is restricted to customers in the States. Unfortunately, Prime Video in Europe consists mostly of content produced by Amazon, because they have world-wide rights on it.

Even if it comes to Europe, if they use the same methodology as they usually do (like 1 USD = 1EUR) you are going to have a worse experience.

Americans don't realize how good they have it. A few years ago, I made a list of over 100 things that are available/possible in the US but not in Canada. It almost made me feel like Canada was a third world country. I'm sure I could find it.

Here are some examples I can remember:

- Amazon Prime

- Amazon selection and prices

- Amazon Dash

- Amazon groceries

- Amazon third-party selling

- Free shipping in most online stores

- Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay (now available in Canada)

- Google Voice

- Google Fi

- T-Mobile unlimited international data

- Credit card churning

- Credit card cashback (up to 6%)

- No taxes on online purchases

- Most prestigious schools in the world

- Netflix content

- MoviePass

- YouTube Red

- Venmo

- Pandora

- Spotify (now available in Canada)

- McDonald's dollar menu, $5 pizza

- Bitcoin exchanges (some options in Canada now)

- Charles Schwab (no international fee)

- Robinhood (zero fee stock trading)

- Cheap Costco booze

- Uber (now available in Canada)

- Airbnb (now available in Canada)

- Planet Fitness ($10, 24-hour gym chain)

- Walmart open 24/7, can camp in parking for free

- You can carry a knife

- Super Bowl ads

- US dollar (most recognized and best exchange rates internationally)

- Dirt cheap chicken and eggs

- Grass fed butter (not strictly US, but impossible to find in Quebec)

- Google Maps satellite resolution and Street view (now available in Canada)

- Best military

- Best Olympic athletes

- Best sport leagues

- Best space program (NASA)

- Most bands tour in USA

- Trader Joe's, Aldi

- You can find American brands (restaurants, foods, cars, clothes, sport teams, movies, electronics) everywhere in the world

- Over 90% of movies and TV shows I've watched are from the US

- Over 50% of the music I listen to is from the US

- Over 90% of podcasts I listen to are from the US

- FAANG, and the quality/compensation of American tech companies

- Most popular guitar brands are American

- Some of the most diverse climate and natural landmarks (Redwoods, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, beaches, deserts, Alaska, Hawaii)

- The world knows more about US politics than their own country's politics (at least that's my case, e.g., everyone can name the US president)

- Most online communities (HN, Reddit) are US-centric (they assume every user is an American)

> Americans don't realize how good they have it.

Some of us do (me, for example). Travel enough and you realize what is actually awesome about America.

But complaining is something Americans do exceptionally well. It is at our core. Just how it is.

And complaining about Americans is something the rest of the world does pretty well.

As is their right!

I'm a recent US -> Canada migrant, and though I agree that there are less services, it seems to have changed a lot since you made this list.

I personally have:

- Amazon Prime

- Apple Pay - Planet Fitness

- Uber and Lyft

- 24/7 grocery stores

- All the big musical acts (which, mind you, is part of being in Toronto and not, like, Winnipeg)

- Legal, weapons-grade weed delivered right to my door

The credit cards, boy, I will give you that. They'll take my Chase Sapphire Reserve from my cold dead hands. (Though Amex is getting aggressive here.)

I would add the one thing we are missing is the BBC, iPlayer, etc. Hey BBC I would PAY for access (already do with a proxy).

I'd rather miss out on all of them and have affordable healthcare for all.

You are correct that many do not appreciate how good US citizens have it. From an self-interest perspective, all of those things are wonderful, like magical candy, who wouldn't want them.

From a cultural diversity perspective, the spread of american monoculture can become depressing.

From the perspective of trying to reduce climate impact to manageable levels, the amount of services you list which make it extremely easy to forget the majority of externalities in daily decision-making cost can be daunting.

From a political perspective, the success of US narrative-based, media-driven discourse represents a large impediment to actual democracy.

From an economic perspective, it can be depressing to know that these services you list exist in a bubble built on top of terrible social support, an exhausting over-work culture, wealth inequality, disgusting homeless and prison rates, a perpetual war machine, and a debt-based currency.

pizza and beer are way too expensive in Canada though, we agree there.

Please tell me this is satire...

Google, Amazon, McDonalds, Walmart, AirBNB, cheap meat & eggs (you know why it's cheap, right?)... all topped off with some hands-down-the-pants fawning over elements of US culture and their 'best military' (do you have a 'top 10 best wars ever' too?).

Just wait until the EU article 11 and 13 pass and I expect a lot of companies to close up shop for euro users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com