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Comment by laacz | Hacker News Reader

What warrants such geoblocking for Apple Fitness+? Content does not seem to be very specific or have overly difficult copyright rules.

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Cultural differences in sensitivity to the appearance (clothing, gender, race, etc) of those appearing on screen seems to me a plausible explanation.

They're adding Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE but not, for example, Sweden, Norway or Denmark. I don't see anything plausible in that.

That's not even to mention features like ECG that are certified EU-wide, yet only available in half of the EU countries, 4 years after launch.

These country limitations are truly mind-boggling. It's as if they put a map on a dartboard when making these decisions.

I can imagine an “all products must be adapted to the local market” type of rule leading to this situation with Fitness+. My country has been added this time around with subtitles, but I’m struggling to imagine how they are useful when the workout is going to constantly take your eyes off the screen.

Music licensing is probably the biggest one.

They already have Apple Music available in a lot more countries, so I don't think that is the issue.

There's a difference between being a streaming service and licensing audio for commercial products. Having Apple Music available somewhere doesn't have any bearing on whether the audio is licensed in a region for other uses.

Maybe more relatively to the languages they have available? Also, licensing video content also tends to be per country.

Don't think it's to do with Language. Malaysia is on the list for the next lot of countries, but not Singapore.

Singapore is (primarily) an English speaking country.

They will release it to a lot more countries and have subtitles in 6 different languages, audio english only. So I'm not sure if the language barrier is the difficulty.

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