What do you know, it is exclusively German language content. And it is also only released when it airs in Germany rather than when it first airs in the US or the UK.
Where is the logic there? If I wanted to get German language TV when it airs on TV, I would just watch TV.
The whole system doesn't make sense.
edit: I see that option has been discussed elsewhere in this thread. Sorry for the repeat.
There is no legal means for someone to restrict where and when I can and cannot choose to view or use content I own, as much as they would love to think so. And they indeed love to think so: I've actually seen companies claim that it is illegal to use the software they sell outside of the country they sell it in.
If a movie by company X is released in country A but not country B, company X cannot prevent me from watching their movie in country B. I may have to go out of my way to import a copy, but there is nothing illegal about doing so (at least not under the laws of typical Western countries).
If this wasn't true, it would basically be illegal to take any sort of media-carrying device (laptop, iPod, etc) outside of the country where you bought the relevant media.
Now I don't pirate, as I am on a WAN (plus I do distance learning through a UK University and have to use their proxy server so iPlayer works for me too) and don't seem to be discriminated against by Hulu, or some other sites (Hulu could be breaking some laws though, by allowing me to see the content, or more likely just breaking a license agreement).
Even Germans I know are encouraged to use proxies (is that really pirating?) because they want their shows when they are released, not months later, and they don't necessarily want them overdubbed into German. The system encourages this, by thinking the internet can be divided up into countries like a broadcast signal.
Copyright laws exist to serve society, not just a handful of corporations.
Laws should be the strictest manifestation of societies expectations. This is clearly not the case here, most people consider this kind of privacy to be about as bad as crossing the street at a red light.
As long as expectations don't change and they clearly won't, people will continue to resort to piracy as long as it is the most convenient way to fulfill their needs.
If people could easily buy music in a lossless format and videos without artificial geographical restrictions at a reasonable price, I seriously doubt that piracy would still be such a "serious" problem.
I'm not a total fanatic, I have no problem with DRM systems if they make sense for e.g. renting movies. I buy all my games via Steam which I consider an awesome platform. However piracy is still the most convenient way to get music/videos quickly in (most of) Europe and it seems very clear who is to blame for that.
I agree that this is something the BBC should look at making available more widely as a revenue generator to fund it's operations but it's not a priority for them.
(I'm in Canada)
Now, with American shows, I think there could easily be a good business model - we've seen English TV channels pick up American shows (sometimes running almost in sync with America, more often than not running a year or two behind) with success. Examples include The West Wing, Friends, Glee, Will and Grace, Family Guy, CSI and so on. So I think there could be enough of an audience over here to be worth doing it.
But iPlayer for non-UK viewers, it just isn't feasible. Firstly, BBC have the content licensed for UK viewing only, and they can't pay extra for international viewers because they are funded by the public (TV license over here). For the BBC website, international viewers see adverts, but that model can't be extended to iPlayer for a few reasons. Firstly, and least importantly, BBC never puts advertising into its shows, and they don't want to go against that, even for an international audience. That could be got around quite easily. Secondly, selling video adverts is a lot more complex (from a sales point of view, not technical) than shoving them into a website, it would take more work from them. And finally, if they were to sell adverts and open up iPlayer to an international audience, I doubt they would make enough revenue from the adverts to justify internationally licensing the content, i.e. there just wouldn't be enough people watching it.
Rent a virtual private server on any of the many UK VPS services. Then use get_iplayer[1] to download TV and radio programmes when you want to.
Although I live in the UK (and pay a TV license), I use this method because it's much more convenient. It doesn't require flash, lets me keep the programme for as long as I want, and downloads are really fast. For example I can grab a 2 hour film from iPlayer into a .flv file in about 15-20 minutes.
[1] http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html
It seems like they're working on it (iPad only, by the looks of it): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/02/bbc-global-iplay...
You're right, though, ad-supported iPlayer isn't feasible.
Quit making excuses and make it happen. The torrenters don't seem to have any trouble building a global distribution network, and they are hiding from the law while simultaneously kicking your butt.
If you don't want to make it happen, quit whining about losing money. I have money and you have TV shows, so let's make a deal.
Unfortunately, this arrangements prohibits them to use any alternate distribution channels to release the content on their own. Also, the regional company is unlikely to have any arrangements with services like Netflix and Hulu.
In the end its all about the money and bureaucracy.
The internet doesn't really know regions, so local distribution partners are no longer a concern (Except maybo for localizing content).
What do you do in the case where a show is shown on ABC in the US and Channel 4 in the UK, and they both have online streaming? How do you just make that happen? Who is going to give up their rights to broadcast online? Are you just going to wish the contracts away? Yes, the torrenters have no problem avoiding the legal limits because they are illegal, that's not an answer.
(Okay, I'll answer.)
Make a new territory called "Internet" which charges viewers directly. If a UK broadcaster wants the UK rights, that would still be available separately. People who would pay a premium aren't really in the same market as people who watch free-with-ads channels.
I know channel 4 etc won't like having a competitor with the same shows on their turf, but they do already - torrenters. At least this way, the competitor will just be one that charges a premium that will only be used by big fans of a show. The casual viewer will remain with the free-with-ads channel.
You can never, ever, expect people to miss out on the culture that's happening during their lives.
If money, or geography, or whatever is preventing it, they'll still do the best they can to make sure they don't miss anything.
I live in Romania, and unfortunately for those a little older than me the '80s were pretty hard times, with us being on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and living under a dictatorship. Nevertheless, people couldn't care less, they were still listening to Radio Free Europe for the latest "decadent" music charts, even though that could have meant their parents losing their State-controlled jobs or even going to prison.
So, yeah, trying to impose stupid barriers (be them real or virtual) has never worked and they'll never do.
The other thing I'd say though is that most people will still operate within their own moral code. In the UK technically platform shifting (transferring music from CD to MP3 for instance) is illegal but that doesn't stop anyone as people see it as a historic oddity and not something which is even remotely morally wrong.
It's not uncommon that the same people who will pirate movies from multi-billion pound businesses will also voluntarily pay when for donationware (or when Radiohead release an album) they could get for nothing.
There are two things we need to look at:
* Availability / technology and restrictions on the ability to obtain media - for instance I torrent because I can't get it legally.
* Why people's moral code does or doesn't allow them to take certain actions?
We're moving increasingly into a trust economy where from a technical point of view people can have what they want and it's almost impossible to stop them.
In that situation your ability to extract payment from them depends on your making a case for why it's reasonable (and indeed beneficial) for them to stump up in a world where the link between what something costs to produce and what it's reasonable to charge for it is a little less obvious than in the days of purely physical product.
I can see the argument for torrent over buy, but not really torrent over nothing.
Recently, while in Germany, I found Youtube content to be highly restricted. I could not view music videos that I can view in Ireland, and I find this arbitrary restriction oppressive. I would imagine that others do too, and will just avail of whatever other means are available to them. Torrents and such are just filling a vacuum.
In Ireland none of the mainstream music streaming services (Spotify, Rhapsody) are available. Grooveshark is.
It's not stealing, it's not not stealing it's just a fact that people will continue to use bittorrents as long as there is too much friction to get it legally.
Bittorrent will be around as long as the content owners insist on localizing copyright and not offering their content to a globally oriented customer base.
You can use bittorrent to download and watch a film that's been released on DVD. This deprives the content created of a sale/hire/watch on demand, so in theory they lose out on revenue.
You can also use bittorrent to download and watch a TV show that was broadcast in another country the night before and that will never be shown on your country's TV network. Think about NBC or Comedy Central - 30 Rock and Colbert aren't going to be broadcast in the UK any time soon, and their content owners refuse to let international users watch online. Torrenting this content is therefore a victimless crime.
I've been to concerts where the artist is touring Australia for the first time and hasn't ever done any Australia specific marketing and they manage to fill out venues. Doubt that would have happened before file sharing.
I recently saw the Product Manager from Spotify give a presentation.
In it he said that spotify users are much more likely to listen to of the charts music when they use spotify. I think he said something like 60 or 80% of the music listened too wasn't chart music.
I seem to remember similar findings with netflix.
In other words when people have to pay for a CD or a DVD they will make the safe choice. But the second there are other options their patterns are different.
In my world at least. There is absolutely nothing philosophically or morally that dictates that it's a right to get paid for something that you can produce once and then mass distribute more or less freely.
It's an opportunity.
The movie industry has no problem replacing jobs previously held by people with machines. They have no problem arguing that people who used to do models with physical materials are just not effective enough. The movie and music industry have no problem distributing their content digitally, laying off thousands of people, closing thousands of stores. All in the name of the progress of technology.
And to be clear I have no problem with that either.
But I just so happen to believe that the same should apply for the record labels and the movie industry.
Just hanging on to old definitions of ownership while ridding themselves of others who aren't following the progress of technology is simply not grounded in anything but lobbyism.
So as long as those industries are not ready to re-considers rights issues while insisting that they should reap the benefits I simply refuse to accept that piracy is in fact piracy in the way it's claimed. I refuse to accept the philosophical premise that is used to define theft, illegal & copyright.
When the underlying reality changes so must the law and regulation. It's there to reflect reality, not the other way round.
1. The resources that were spent on these products will be invested alternatively.
2. With a lower margin for performance, continued (live) performance becomes the only way to make a living.
3. Production-on-demand as opposed to production, followed by marketing for demand will produce more producer-motivated that audience-motivated content.
4. MTV cribs will have a lot less bling.
5. Based on my middling wage in the financial services sector, I could totally get a Kylie.
Why should the music and movie industry be the only industries being allowed to keep the middle men when the value they provide is almost nill.
The reality is that the bands coming out today have no problem being both good with marketing, technology and doing music.
There is nothing that says that it's a right of a musician to record an album for almost nothing, reproduce and distribute it litterally for free. And make hundreds of millions reselling it. It's not a right it's a privilege.
Until then, I'll torrent those TV shows, and use my Netflix subscription to watch movies.
And, I would love to torrent the TV shows from the official TV site. I'd do it even if they included a reasonable amount of commercials. Reasonable is hard to define, but if they became annoying, I'd go back to what I have. If they setup their own tracker, then they'd be able to count the downloaders, which is no different than counting people that have their DVR record a show. Well, it's a little different in that they can't spy on your watching habits like TiVo and the others apparently do.
They could deal a death blow to piracy very swiftly, if they wanted. But they don't. They want the current system, at all costs.
Also, we do have the playstation store (well... used to) but all the movies there are dubbed and we can't get the original version (with or without subtitles). I'll stick with bittorent for now...
I always cringe hard and scream inside when I see that since I am trying to view a link online on a website so it should not make ANY difference which country I am coming from. Please keep your pre-historic distribution and business model out of the web!!!
Doing something like that should just be banned by law.
I believe this is another example of where piracy was a force for good (for the consumer) Another example is how many nonDRMed music is more easily purchasable, and many TV stations (eg BBC) have online 'watch yesterday's show' services.
But it's a tricky problem, because of the heavy involvement of intellectual-property laws and tangled webs of existing licensing arrangements (defended by large incumbent players with large legal teams).
Artificial problems are murderously difficult to crack and often disappears when the underlying technology shifts.
No one has ever gotten past step one.
Stealing something (or obtaining it illegally) just because someone doesn't want to sell it to you (or give it to you for free) is still stealing (or obtaining it illegally), regardless of the fact that you want it so bad.
As long as you own something, you have the right to choose if you want to sell it to some country, give it for free or do whatever else.
I sometimes torrent TV shows that I forgot to DVR and don't really feel bad about it.
It really is a symptom of the decadence and entitlement of your typical Internet user.
If the entire internet disappeared tomorrow, am I allowed to complain about it? Where do you draw the line? ("Be thankful for your brocolli, there are starving children in Africa")
I've long advocated a fair-use rule that where a copyrighted work in some format isn't readily for sale in some geographical area, then people in that area should have the legal right to produce a copy of it in that format for themselves. The format is relevant because if people want CDs or uncompressed FLAC albums but they can only buy a lousy DRM-ridden 128Kbit/s MP3 instead, it shouldn't count.
Same goes with old music or films: if nobody's selling, people have the legal right to copy. If the copyright holder decides to start selling again, the legal right to copy goes away. Then the longevity of a copyright would matter much less.
The buy 'physical media via the Internet' argument doesn't fly there either.
I'm sick and tired of the entitled whining. Nobody owes you the right to listen to the latest album of whoever is at the top of the charts; in fact, nobody owes you anything but what they agreed on. The proposition is very clear: there are people who create something. They give it to you, on the condition that you pay for it. They may not want to offer it to you because it's too hard to do business in your country. If you don't agree to their terms, or their decision not to offer you their stuff, that still doesn't give you the right to just take whatever it is they're offering from another source.
Feel free to find other people who make things you want and offer it at terms you accept; or petition people to offer things at a cheaper price; or whatever. But taking things from creators against their wishes is not only criminal but also immoral.
(Maybe you still do it, even if it's criminal and immoral. That's a personal decision. But then just acknowledge it for what it is and don't try to weasel yourself out of the moral responsibility).
http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/04/07/hulu-and-iplayer-outsi...
The advantage over a VPN-based solution is that there is no need to route all of your traffic over the VPN. Most of the time they only redirect the geo-location stuff and once you receive the videostream URL, that transfer will go over your 'regular' connection. It also allows you to just put their DNS servers into your router and your Apple TV / Wii / iPad ... will automatically use the service.
Security wise, they might be able to redirect any domain resolution to their servers, but they still won't be able to fake the SSL certificates. As long as you're using IMAPS/HTTPS/*S you should be fine I guess.
The world will move to laws which are unified (or at least close enough) and allow day and date releases and true international markets but it's unrealistic to expect it to happen overnight.
But a resistance to change (some of which will have it's feet in positive intentions, some in negative) is different to collusion.
I'm guessing it depends at which store you are buying it. Many of the US stores don't sell to foreigners, though. Could they be afraid of fraud?
As for the latter, what exactly is the point in "protecting intellectual property rights" in Estonia if you don't sell anything there in the first place, and as a result everyone there who would like to buy your stuff is getting it off thepiratebay.org? Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.
https://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1437... (new list)
