with the world becoming smaller it's pretty easy to find a foreign film
sporting event or breaking news story that you're interested in from abroad
but then when you go to tune in or watch that Blu-ray you ordered from Hong Kong
bam you're hit with an error saying you can't watch hardboiled with chow Yun fat
in your region well what gives with that
region locking has been a fact of life for a while but has become especially
frustrating since DVDs Rose to pop popularity in the late 1990s and the way
it's worked since then is pretty much like this when you go to buy a movie or
a TV show you might see a little globe on the back with a number from 1 through
7 for DVDs or a letter from a through c
for blu-ray discs these refer to the region of the world the dis is intended
to be used in but why would that matter
well you see DVD and Blu-ray players
sold in a specific region are locked on
a firmware level to whichever region they are sold in which like the disc you
can usually see by checking on the back of the player so if you're in the US
with a region one player and you order a DVD from Hong Kong like our example
before which is in Region Three assuming that you didn't buy a region free disc
on the black market you are going to be out of luck though fun fact some
computer Optical drives allow you to change the region but after you've done
it a few times these drives also become region locked in the firmware but come
on lus that's Stone Age Technology I
stream everything online well even so
you've probably encountered region locking anyway especially if you're
trying to do something like watch European soccer in North America or
access the US Netflix library from Canada in cases like these the website
you're trying to access will determine your location by looking at your IP
address and block it if you're in an IP range that they know belongs to a
different country and although many enterprising movie lovers and sports
fans have gotten around this using VPN services that route data traffic through
a different location which you can learn more about here this isn't a foolproof
solution since some content providers block IP ranges that they suspect belong
to commercial VPN Services as well okay then lonus why do the powers that be
bother with all of this if I pay for something why can I just watch it don't
they want my money well it used to be that
technological compatibility was a big part of the rationale for region locking
when DVDs started becoming widespread many TVs were still predominantly using
analog inputs and different parts of the world used incompatible standards for
analog TV with ntsc popular in the
Americas Korea and Japan and pal and ccam dominant in most most of the rest
of the world this is actually why cartridges for older game systems like
the SNES and Sega Genesis wouldn't work with versions of the console purchased
from different countries although there were workarounds but back to the bit
about creators in the modern day wanting your money well someone definitely does
but who has the right to collect it you
see creators want to be able to control
how their content is distributed so they can make royalties off of it and since
there isn't a worldwide emperor of copyright Lord of distribution it often
Falls to smaller third-party distributors in individual countries who
are contracted to take a cut for handling marketing and localization for
the content and to pass along some
pre-negotiated royalties to the original
Creator so with modern digital standards
allowing quick distribution of nearly anything to the entire world I still
expect region locking to be around for quite a while as copyright holders try
to keep their content from floating about freely in every corner of
cyberspace and I wish them luck with that speaking of luck if you were
wondering to yourself gee if only there was an online platform where I could get
the best audio books for a reasonable price and I could download them and
listen to them on my mobile device if I'm you know bored at work and I have a
monotonous job or if I'm driving ding or if I'm trying to fall asleep at night
then you're in luck because audible.com exists yes my friends it
does to save you the person who wants to read but doesn't have the time to sit
down and stare at a book from not knowing what happens in really John how
to make Friends and Influence People by Dale carnegi because I'm lonely and my
employees never listen to me that's what
John put in there well audible.com has
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale carnegi but they also have lots
of other stuff too like fiction and periodicals and wow now I feel now I
feel really sad what a mean thing to say anyway you can get your free audiobook
with a 30-day free trial to their audiobook membership at audible.com
tequi by checking out the link in the video description so thanks for watching
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