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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Media companies are tied up in contracts designed for the TV/Movie age - spelling out distribution rights geographically and by channel (media). It may take a generation to get free of all that.

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So, these media companies would love nothing more than to provide (or enable someone else to provide) a Steam-like worldwide un-region-locked reasonably priced streaming service that supports all my devices, lets me pick and choose audio tracks/encodings and subtitles, not force me to go through a network of partners or worry about who has a distribution deal with who--a service that just lets me pick a show/movie and watch it. But, the only reason they can't do this is "contracts"? We're not talking about the speed of light or the limits of thermodynamics. Contracts are written by humans, signed by humans, and enforced by humans. Surely if the humans running these companies really wanted to provide such a customer-focused product, they could today stop signing these "old media" contracts and work together to quickly unwind what's preventing them from competing with piracy. I don't buy the "but our hands are tied" story.

I live in Australia, where media distribution rights have been negotiated with a small range of distributors. When someone like Netflix shows up, there's not much they can show here without infringing on someone else's exclusive rights.

Each of the distributors is then tied into exclusive deals with TV stations, streaming services, etc.

It's the "exclusive" part of the rights that stops us from having nice things.

Oh, and Steam? un-region-locked? Hahahahhahahaahaha no

I agree, steam has some massively stupid region locks. For example, a friend wanted me to play the secret world recently. I could not download it from Japan, on steam, but could from the companies site.

I ended up logging into his steam to download the client, then launched from the directory to log into my account(due to their slow servers, steams being faster and more updated - go figure).

It's not as simple. Even if they decided today to provide such a service they would still have to wait for the old contracts to expire. The problem is that if let's say a polish TV station bought exclusive rights for the show in their country, the media company can't provide worldwide rights to anybody without breaking the polish contract.

> But, the only reason they can't do this is "contracts"?

You make it sound like the contracts aren't a real barrier. If they break their contracts, they could face millions, nay, billions in fines, fees, and settlements from being sued by everyone they had a contract with.

> they could today stop signing these "old media" contracts

They have. But contracts for broadcasting rights are usually 10 year deals. And up until recently (2010-ish) they were usually just automatically renewed. So you're looking at old media sticking around until 2020-ish. By then, most companies will have moved on from the old way of doing things completely.

Those contacts are worth millions of dollars in up-front, risk-free cash. Why would they give them up for pennies on the dollar?

They can't deal with existing outlets without signing contracts. And those existing old-boys want contracts with limits like regional exclusivity. So its either go all-streaming or all-traditional.

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