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Comment by Typhon | Hacker News Reader

It's obvious that many new forms of entertainment will use the web as a medium which, barring dictatorships, is worldwide, so you don't have to worry about it, insofar as you have enough bandwidth.

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GeoIP data is 99% accurate at the country level, so it's trivially easy to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, and some web sites have been doing it for a while. Sure, there are ways around that too, but most people are not technically inclined enough to figure them out. As one article recently posted on HN said (can't find it right now), we need to stop thinking only about technical solutions, and start attacking problems at the political and cultural level. After all, using a VPN to get around a restriction will only work until the authorities (government, RIAA, whoever) find a way to block it. It's a never ending arms race. We need to fix the political problem of censorship in order to achieve a permanent solution.

In the context of a replacement for Hollywood by something new, most likely something new on the internet, why would anyone bother to restrict the market to a specific region ?

My comment wasn't about technical feasibility, it was more about the fact that, by default, the web is a planetary medium, therefore, any new entertainment made on it is available without regional restriction unless the authors take steps to create such restrictions.

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nice

(psst... there's a button for that :-)

You know what's available in all regions? BitTorrent.

And then Hollywood complains about people in unusual regions torrenting things.

Right... go tell that to Hulu and Netflix. I'd do it myself, but it's not available on my region. And I'm not even in a 3rd world country! Go figure...

Many new-ish forms of entertainment already use the web as a medium, but that has not helped the region problem much. Hulu, Netflix, Turntable.fm and many many other services are US-only.

Incidentially I wouldn't call Hulu, Netflix and the likes "new-ish forms of entertainment", they're basically just new distribution channels for the old form and thus dependent on the content creators. And it's the content creators that impose the regional limits. I'd assume given the choice Hulu and Netflix would open up their offers to anyone with bandwidth to spare.

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