January 15, 2002
Count On It ...
The holidays are over, and lots of people got DVD's as presents.
Now, I knew my kids would be playing theirs on their computers, in addition to the Sony PlayStation 2, which is hooked up to the big family television. What I didn't know was that we were locked into something called a "Region 1" encoding scheme.
That's right. All our equipment, along with our DVD's, has been intentionally and technically restricted to work solely in the US market.
Once alerted, I scoured my home for overt signs. I gathered up our DVD's, their plastic cases and glossy inserts. I located all the hardware, and even found the original box for the PlayStation.
Within ten minutes, I had figured out that the tiny etched symbol with the globe and the "1" inside, actually meant something important -- it meant everything we owned would only work in Region 1: the United States.
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I must say the meaning of this restriction certainly wasn't made clear by anything I read that day. Except possibly in one instance. Printed on the back of one of the inserts was this simple sentence: "This is a Region 1 disc and can only be used on Region 1 players."
Well, thank you, Universal Studios. At least you're being upfront about it.
Now, I've known for some time that there are different formats for television sets in different areas of the world. After all, television was born at a time when the world was a very regional place. But today, we're global. No technology will reach just one area, or even one nation, or one continent.
Still, the American movie industry has divvied up the world into 6 regions, and assigned each of them a different "data encoding" scheme. And the electronics manufacturers have happily played along.
So, don't try to send that DVD you purchased down at the mall to your buddy in New Zealand. It won't work on his DVD player. You see, in this way, Hollywood can string out the release of first-run movies for nearly a year.
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You know, I wouldn't be so riled up about all this, but this is new technology, which could be made to work very well everywhere right from the start. But the industry has taken extra effort to control the global consumer.
Their business strategy is to link the selling of information to the selling of a physical product. Any time you want it, you've basically got to pay up. And you can bet they have no intention of enabling kids to download these movies, and pass them around to each other, Napster-style.
Now, I can appreciate fairly compensating the creators of anything, but these people have a lock on the market. And it's absolutely clear: these encoding schemes have nothing to do with the limits of technology, and everything to do with greed.
I'm not so sure, as we move into this globalized world, where large chunks of data will soon be able to flow everywhere, that these kind of artificial controls will be appreciated by the consumer.
It might be interesting to watch the first global consumer revolt.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
