Re: Is EME usable regardless of the software/hardware I use ?

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
> On that one point, that the Internet is global makes little difference to
> the economics of distributing content. For a service to launch in a given
> country it first needs to obtain rights to distribute content in that
> country.

Yes. (Territorial licensing on the Internet is very sad. A bug, IMO.)

> It could buy global rights, but that would be expensive given that
> it also needs to do several other things on a per country basis:
> - ensuring it has serving capacity (meaning physical servers in the right
> places)
> - hooking up to local payment systems,
> - marketing
> - internationalization, including subtitles and dubs which often have to be
> obtained from parties others than the original content licensor.

FWIW, Apple launched movies on iTunes in Finland without addressing
any of these points at launch. The same probably applies to other
Nordic countries. (Well, I don’t know what they did about servers, but
the performance is still similar to them not having set up local
servers. Of course, since Apple does ahead of time downloads, this is
less of an issue for Apple than for Netflix.)

Seems like these points aren't part of the minimum viable product. If
a company decides they don't want to launch just to an audience with
sufficient English listening comprehension (or reading comprehension
from captions made for the U.S. deaf audience) skills and
international credit cards with no marketing, that's a business
decision of what level of polish they want associated with their brand
on balance with the brand problem of outright unavailability—but
evidently not a “need to do” thing. (As for polish, Apple has even
allowed the level of polish deteriorate over time by replacing English
blurbs shown to Finnish customers with Danish text… They can get away
with the Danish blurbs and the lack of marketing for the same reason
they can get away with DRM: the content is in such high demand. They
have added subtitles over time, though.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 6 June 2013 06:42:18 UTC