thanks for the debate over the past couple of days. There have been some good points raised.

However, at times I fear the conversation has been getting a little heated at times on Delimiter and sometimes a little circular. Sometimes the argument has also gotten a bit irrational. This isn’t what I’m really aiming for with the site — what I want to promote is new ideas, new discussions, to help push things forward.

I want Delimiter to be a forum of open-minded individuals, debating things based on evidence. I don’t like inherent political bias and I have felt recently that some of this has crept back into our conversation.

With this in mind I’m closing this thread. I’ll consider over the next couple of days how to stimulate things more in the direction I’m after.

Cheers,

Renai

You make a good point. However, you’re also mixing 2 points together- Licensing and distribution.

Channel 10 buy a license to show NCIS, but they don’t distribute it. They distribute the licenses to, for example, Neighbours (particularly in the UK) because they make it. But Netflix only distribute the content, they don’t make it. They’re middlemen.

The whole license/distribution system is built around profit. The problem with that is, if you control the rights in that country, consumers are automatically forced into a monopoly. In any other industry, this would lead to a cry of outrage. And yet in content, it’s simply a way of life. It is an old system. A broken system that needs revamping for today.

The internet is the way it will happen. Companies can get on board, continue to produce good shows, license them at reasonable rates to distributors, or distribute it themselves and they can continue to be profitable, albeit likely with some fat trimming. Or they can continue with the old system….and watch as it dies over a number of years…..

Since society is being punished for ignoring barriers of entry for new competitors with a relaxed ‘free market’ attitude. I guess it’s time for the government to step in.

And thats the exact situation with some Adobe products. You can fly to LAX, walk across the road to a Fry’s store and get their Creative Suite software for $2300, when its $4000 here.

While thats one of the extreme examples, there are plenty of others. And they are the reasons theres such discussion over it. With the parity our dollar has enjoyed for quite a while now, the excuse of exchange rate has been shown to be bogus, and that the real reasons are more about price gouging.

Which is what needs to stop. I have no problems with higher prices where its justified, but at the moment nothing does justify it. Even the larger market of the US isnt justification when the products are made on our doorstep.

Economics of scale have a place, but the bigger the scale, the less benefit you get from the discounts, and our market is big enough that we wouldnt be that far behind the tipping point – you get big savings jumping from 100 items to 1000, not jumping from 1,000 to 10,000 or 10,000 to 100,000.

This is the answer! Nice.

Good point.

However, this whole licensing point still stands. It is ridiculous that the licensing isn’t homogenised across countries. Essentially what they’re doing is capitalising on “Ooo, I think they’d want that more, let’s charge them more for it”. It’s a bastardised version of Supply and Demand to simply make more profit. It costs them not 1 cent more to distribute it here, yet they make a 20, 40, 60% profit on it because no one else has it.

That’s called monopolisation and price gouging. It’s illegal in this country. But because they’re outside our country AND there’s no other way to get the content, they get away with it.

But I do think there are pitfalls in proposing to legislate against selling products for a different price in different territories. Applying public pressure is the best you can do.

The only thing not blocked for Aussies are digital shorts from SNL on there at this time.

Even our ABC is a content partner to them ironically. Seven, 9 and TEN aren’t.

Hulu is offered in Japan though and is very popular over there where geo-unblocking services seemed to be not as popular there for Hulu there since last year.

At this point at this time Hulu can’t commit to further international launches for now.

I know for a fact that Hulu does own a Australian domain name, Hulu.com.au since 2010.

They are unable to make use of it currently as they haven’t confirmed when they’ll get international streaming rights for Australia.

I know many Aussies on Twitter have been told by Hulu’s support team there that they’re working on getting international streaming rights so they can offer Hulu here officially but refuse to say when that will occur.

They’ve been vague about when they’ll get international streaming rights for Australia and no news about Australian launch plans from Johannes Larcher who’s in charge of international at Hulu.

Hulu recently talked about the success of their separate and only current international offering in Japan, Hulu Japan on blog.hulu.com just last month and are focused on improving their Japanese offering before launching, say locally.

Until then geo unblocking services will be needed still for Hulu

Another example, NBC (a co-owner of Hulu) accidentally made a iPad app available for a short time in Australia last year on the iPad with full episodes.

A short time later they decided to geo block the content in the app to US IP addresses only and remove it from the Australian app store.

What Renai said. And also, the free services do it to limit bandwidth usage. THAT is the main reason, seeing as it is free and they have limited bandwidth available.

The 2 cannot be compared.

The Geo-blocking occurs in America, not Australia.

Let’s not forget that free services have this in place too – the BBC iPlayer, Hulu, and (almost) every other first world broadcaster does it including every TV network in this country, including your ABC.

If the federal government did legislate this, would they also legislate for the ABC to remove iview geo-blocking for those overseas?

The question is who would stumble first, Steam or the big 5?

Teh other question is, if you were Steam, would you be willing to risk that?

That would send a message to publishers not to ignore us.

Unfortunately I doubt we would ever get enough people to do it to have enough of an effect.

They’re not likely to kill their own business. Something in the vicinity of 40% of all games sold now are distributed digitally.

So that would be a MASSIVE chunk of revenue those publishers would lose out on by refusing to accept Steam’s “Charge everyone the same” policy…..