matrixschmatrix wrote:Well that's interesting, and I do understand the argument, but it still seems as though the argument is that Europe comprises a lot of very small markets which need to have the right to license individually from producers. That makes sense. Blu-ray region locking, though, treats all of Europe as one single market- there's only one region code available for Europe- which seems like it undercuts that idea.
They didn't have a choice under European single market rules. Back in the 1990s when DVD region coding was first devised, the Hollywood majors wanted to subdivide Europe into multiple zones, but this turned out to be illegal - which is why Europe has always been Region 2
tout court. I imagine they could have created a separate zone for non-EU countries like Switzerland, Norway and so on, but that was presumably judged too messy.
It seems as though many content distributors are willing to assume that most people will not import, regardless of region restrictions, so that it's safe to sell separately to different markets without them- as apparently would have been the case on Metropolis, but for Kino's intervention.
Officially, distributors aren't supposed to sell outside their territory. In practice, they're powerless to stop people importing, and of course have no incentive to do so - a release as high-profile as
Metropolis would certainly have sold plenty of copies abroad (just as I imagine Kino's Blu-ray catalogue has sold plenty in Europe - I own much of it myself).
And some distributors go out of their way to make their discs as compatible as possible - the BFI deliberately mastered their Ritwik Ghatak DVDs to NTSC, and I believe all their Blu-rays to date are 1080p throughout, with all SD PAL content relegated to supplementary DVDs (which are more likely to be compatible internationally). MoC has a similar policy, only in their case the SD video content on their Blu-rays is in 480p, which any player should be able to handle.
It's possible I'm missing something, because I'm not sure I fully understand your point about forced subs,
Sometimes rightsholders insist on language restrictions as part of the licensing agreement - either forced subtitles, or no subtitles in a particular language. Ruscico's own DVDs have multiple language tracks and even more subtitle options, but the versions distributed by Nouveaux in the UK are far more restricted - either to unsubtitled English dubs or the original Russian with forced English subs. I don't imagine for one second that this was Nouveaux's choice, and I know that MoC's insistence on unforced subtitles meant that they couldn't licence certain titles. French DVDs are notorious for not often offering English subtitles, probably because the rightsholder has his eye on sales to English-speaking territories - conversely, countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary tend to offer English subs more often than not, because it's vanishingly rare that rights get sold to the UK, so they might as well encourage the likes of me to import.
but it seems as though region locking is (like most other ways imposed on consumers to stop them doing as they please) something of a lost cause- it may be specific to America, but I don't know anyone who would bother importing DVDs in the first place who doesn't know how to get around region restrictions. That's less true for Blu-ray, but I don't think it will remain less true for long.
Almost certainly not, though I haven't taken the plunge yet as it seems to me that we're still in the equivalent of the DVD situation in the late 1990s - i.e. going multiregion was possible, but expensive and unreliable.
