People living outside the USA get used to seeing sort of thing—and are constantly annoyed by it. We're blocked from seeing some online videos because we're not in the US (online audio tracks aren’t usually geo-restricted). This applies mainly to music videos and TV shows on mainstream sites, including YouTube and the sites of US TV networks (of course, some NZ online videos can't be viewed in the US).
This situation is just plain stupid: The restrictions are easily defeated and only serve to piss off people. What industry other than the entertainment industry can get away with treating their customers so badly, and with such contempt?
The irony is that these restrictions actually encourage piracy—especially of TV shows. We have a globally connected world that’s created a de facto global entertainment market. However, geographic restrictions mean that consumers who want to share in the experience of a TV show with their friends and family around the world often have no viable alternative to illegal downloads.
That gets at a related problem: If TV shows from the US ever come to New Zealand at all, it’s often weeks—or even months—after they first aired in the US. That’s improved—a little. Time was, TV shows from the US could be delayed by more than a year, even 18 months. Nowadays, the maximum is months. Movies, too, were often delayed by many months, but the trend has been toward global release dates so there’s less reason to download illegal copies of movies.
The problem in all this is twofold: Copyright restrictions affect everything online. Those rights are controlled by megacorporations in the entertainment industry, who have ultimate control over who sees what where when and how.
Related to this is a second problem: Broadcast/streaming rights to TV shows are locked-up by NZ’s two free-to-air networks or the one pay TV provider, meaning no one else can compete.
There’s some competition for broadcast/streaming of movies in that people with an Apple TV can rent movies from iTunes, however, this gets to the third problem: Anti-competitive practices.
Our sole pay TV company, Sky Television, has stitched up deals with many of New Zealand’s Internet Service Providers to ensure that the data used to access streaming movies from Sky won’t be charged as data, and it won’t count toward the customer’s data caps. The trouble with is that the agreement requires that ISPs not give the same deals to any other streaming service (Netflix has been eyeing entry to New Zealand, as has an Australian company). This means that anyone using another service will be charged the full cost of the data used and it will count toward a customer’s data caps. In other words, every service other than Sky will be at a dramatic competitive disadvantage and customers would pay far, far more. We’ll end up with, of course, no viable alternative to Sky.
And that brings this all full circle. The greed of big businesses in the entertainment industry—whether megacorporations in the US or Sky Television in New Zealand—keep New Zealanders from being able to be global citizens, let alone consumers of content we’re more than willing to pay for if they’d just let us! (the success of iTunes Music Store and other services proves we're willing to pay for content).
In sum, this is another disadvantage of living in a small country on the edge of the world: We’re pushed around by the greedy big guys, and our current National Party government—with its head well up the backsides of big corporations—does nothing to fight on our behalf. And so we wait.
At least that irritating message did make me sort of laugh—for a second or two.
No comments:
Post a Comment