Forum - View topicNEWS: European Commission to Assess Limiting Geoblocking for Streaming Platforms in EU
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CrypticPurpose
 Posts: 341 |
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I may be wrong, but I feel like a lot of this content would be irrelevant to the majority of people simply because it isn't available in their language anyway - i.e., most Greece viewers wouldn't really miss German sitcoms that are only streamed in German.
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Lupica
Posts: 90 |
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That may be true for a lot of people, but not everyone is monolingual. If someone is living in (or even just visiting) another country - which is part of the point of the single market - or has taken the trouble to learn a second or third language - which is extremely common across Europe - it makes no sense for their geographical location to block them from viewing content in the language they want. It's an excellent way of learning new languages and the viewer can decide for themselves what they want to watch. My family includes native speakers of no fewer than six different languages from a variety of continents. We all live in the same country. But only those of us born here get to enjoy most media in our mother tongue.
I speak four languages fluently enough to enjoy native content without subtitles but most of the services in my country only give the option of English and divide up viewing rights so content in other languages isn't available anywhere, even if I go to the trouble of subscribing to a foreign service. It's a ridiculous way of doing business in the modern world. |
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Escaflowne2001
Posts: 468 |
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Does that mean to bring something over to the European Union Netflix for example would have to buy the streaming rights to all 26 members countries surely. Otherwise they wouldn't have the rights to steam in a number of countries. Which in turn could result in less being brought over.
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Erufailon4
Posts: 202 Location: Finland |
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That could be solved if the rights owners considered the entire EU a single country when selling streaming licenses, but that would mean less licenses sold and thus less money, and rights owners outside of EU (such as in Japan) would never agree to that. |
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Ushio
Posts: 636 |
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The reason geo blocking in the EU has got so much worse is the EU's own content quota's.
Netflix in Greece for example must have 30% of the content available to the Greek population be produced by Greece. So since different EU nations produce varying quantities of content the amount of content a streamer can offer differs. Germany produces a lot more content every year than Lithuania or Greece.
Netflix already did that and has been buying world wide rights for every show or film it gets for several years now. The issue is EU content quota's that say at a minimum 30% of content must be locally produced but since Germany produces a lot more content in a year than Greece the 30% quota means the German population can get a lot more non German content than Greece can. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1009 |
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It's 100% because of the EU and its member states' own content regulations about locally produced content. It's just logically impossible to simultaneously have all content viewable in at least one EU member viewable everywhere and still have the national level content quotas. There's no possible way for 30% of the content to be from every country when there's more than three countries, unless I suppose you have a bunch of productions that manage to count as local to nearly every EU state simultaneously. |
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stefand
 Posts: 56 Location: Germany |
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The quota are not due to the EU, these are local regulations. There exists one in France, but no such regulation in Germany.
I understand, that licence holder do want to sell licenses regionally and that a streaming service, that does not want to stream in Spain does not want to buy spanish licenses. But it really is a pain to e.g. pay the same for crunchyroll as another country and only get half of the content. Last edited by stefand on Mon Dec 07, 2020 10:12 am; edited 1 time in total |
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SHD
Posts: 1759 |
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Except, maybe, Germans living in Greece. Or Greeks who know German. And so on and so forth, if you live in the EU you should know that a ton of people move around regularly, there's tons of expats of every nationality living in other countries, etc. And then there are, for example, people like me who would like to legally access certain shows, including anime and manga for that matter, but literally cannot, because they're geoblocked out of every single legal source. Geoblocking is insane in the year of our lord 2020, especially within the EU. They should have started working on this years ago. I guess it's better late than never. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13626 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Even if a rights holder is open to expanding their product to more territories, it sucks how the territory that they live in might say otherwise.
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Badej
Posts: 19 |
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Not only that but a lot of Europeans know at least one other language so it wouldn't be irrelevant even for Greeks watching German sitcoms. On another note its about time the EU is going to adress the bullshit called geoblocking especially within the EU as it goes directly against the single market principle. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10463 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Geoblocking sucks for consumers.
But here's the thing. If platforms end up being forbidden from geoblocking their content, this will hurt small domestic licensing companies. That small Italian or Spanish anime company can't afford to license Europe wide rights. While they might be able to afford a "Europe wide Italian" license, they'll be competing with companies who put out "Europe Wide English/French/German," and those bigger markets will probably get their titles released sooner. Almost everyone in Europe speak more than one language. The most common second languages in Europe are English (44% of residents post Brexit), German (36%) and French (29%). So if an Italian consumer can watch a show in English/French/German months before they can watch it in Italian, they probably won't wait for the Italian release. The only company that will benefit from this is Netflix. Despite the fact that this is framed as targeting Netflix, it honestly plays right into their hands. This is my first take on the situation. I'll speak to some European licensors and see what they think. -t |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5599 |
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That's completely irrelevant when 1. people can LEARN other languages 2. companies like Netflix already often have English subtitles and most the world speaks English 3. can add subtitles (or dub) geo/region blocking is awful and outdated, ESPECIALLY for digital content |
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Badej
Posts: 19 |
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That's a bad take then. Sony already owns most major publishers in Europe. Besides, the UK mostly has the best releases of anime in the EU anyway, so why wait for an inferior product. I certainly won't wait for the Dutch publisher that released Weathering With You on blu ray that somehow looked worse than a 480p Crunchyroll stream. |
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nargun
Posts: 930 |
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Basically the EU position is that you can't meaningfully sell rights country-by-country. The single market is a single market: anything that can be sold anywhere in the EU can be sold anywhere in the EU. A company in Hungary can ship it's product to any customer in the EU who wants to pay: the EU banned geographical limits to physical product sales literally decades ago and they're unsurprisingly moved on to compliance enforcement to digital. This reflects absolute core principles of the EU and is 100% not up for negotiation. If this causes you problems the EU perspective is that they are your problems and it's up to you to solve them in whatever way takes your fancy but they are not shifting an inch. |
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SHD
Posts: 1759 |
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And that's what's important. That's where it should end. Domestic licensors will of course tell you otherwise, but frankly, at this point I really don't give a flying figleaf. Geoblocking is one of the biggest driving forces behind piracy - so many people, especially the less IT/internet-savvy ones, or casual viewers, would just sit back and watch anime using their existing Netflix or Crunchyroll or Amazon accounts instead of having to wade through streaming websites or torrent aggregators, or even to fiddle around with VPN. Does this suck for small domestic companies? Yes. Does this suck in general, due to large multicorporations just sucking in general? Yes. But it's not like domestic companies are entirely blameless for us having ended up here. Really, I'm sorry for people who may lose jobs if something comes out of this initiative (as someone who has worked for some I know all too well what their position is like), but also, we should remember that they're also screwed if people just 1. pirate/VPN-watch/etc stuff instead of waiting forever to be able to buy it from them*, or even 2. decide to continue pirating/VPN-watching/etc. even if the stuff they want is available because most non-hardcore fans are not going to subscribe to a dozen different services, especially in these covid-19 times.** And once people get used to consuming something in a certain way, especially if it's free, cheap and/or convenient - well, good luck trying to change that behavior. *And this goes for manga, too. I mean, let's say you're a smaller, domestic Hungarian publisher who has finally, after years of negotiation, managed to secure rights to publish Popular Shounen Jump Title On Its 30h Volume Already. Yay! ...and now good luck convincing your already small audience that they should start buying this series from volume one, even though if they're interested in it they're already up to date with it one way or another. **Not to mention, it's not like most domestic markets in the EU are large enough to support even one or two "small domestic licensors", never mind multiple. Fact is, anime and manga are relatively niche, animation and comics in general are. And except for a (relative) handful of hardcore fans people don't consume enough anime/manga regularly to sustain a diverse portfolio of streaming/simulpub content. In countries with a long animation/comics, or even anime/manga history like France, Italy, Germany - perhaps. But in smaller countries, or countries where animation and comics are not particularly culturally relevant - nope. I live in one of these countries, and have seen the struggle of domestic licensors trying to get a hold on the market, from a very close position, and they all failed eventually. (I wish someone would force Japan to rethink their geoblocking tendencies as well... I'd be buying so much more stuff if it was available to me without having to jump through infinite hoops just for the privilege of being allowed to pay for it - or hell, being available to me at all.) Last edited by SHD on Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:51 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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