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As a Canadian who endlessly faces geo-restrictions on US-based content, it seems inaccurate to hold DVD regionalization as some bygone oddity -- it is very much

As a Canadian who endlessly faces geo-restrictions on US-based content, it seems inaccurate to hold DVD regionalization as some bygone oddity -- it is very much alive and well, maybe more prevalent than ever. The logical reason is of course business optimization. The people who licensed content to a Japanese ebook bookseller don't want them taking sales from other licensees in other areas. The television program that is on Hulu doesn't want to be seen by Canadians, where entirely different licensees pay big money for a monopoly on the content. And so on. And of course the Android store lets you limit apps to certain countries often for entirely practical reasons. When the Chromecast was only available in the US, the app was similarly restricted to only the US, presumably to avoid support and other issues outside of the country.

gingerlime 13y ago
Similarly to my comment above, I think there's an unnecessary entanglement of delivery mechanism (the app) and content (the ebook). Authors and publishers should realise the potential to reach audiences that would otherwise not be accessible, and make the most of it. Instead they lock themselves and take away one of the amazing benefits of this new format. I think the DVD region protection has clearly failed. Most players can be switched to region-free mode, and it's much easier obtaining copies of the media via file sharing or otherwise (and in many cases it would be legal to do so if you own a copy of the DVD). I was hoping that by now people will learn from the mistakes of the DVD region protection and the frustration it brought to customers who paid for your product and figure out something better by now. But this stupidity will likely to continue, until it fails again.