[quote=“Abadd”]Situations such as your own are an extreme minority. Most people don’t care about foreign films. The majority of major DVD releases originate in the US, so what movie companies are most worried about is not the importing of, say, Chinese movies into the US, but the exporting of US movies to the other territories. What happens is that if they don’t attempt to discourage that, you see a much higher level of purchasing of US movies overseas than the opposite, so you have a fairly big grey market.
What that essentially means is that when the studios try to set up distribution deals with publishing companies overseas, the overseas publishing companies are either less enthusiastic about the product simply because there is such a big grey market, so they don’t bother taking the title, or if they ignore the grey market, their sales end up getting hurt by it.
If you really want to play movies from other regions, then buy a DVD player from that region (or find a region free DVD player if you can).[/quote]
I don’t see how allowing a US DVD to work on a Zone 4 DVD player would hurt sales very much. If the DVD is already available in my part of the world, there aren’t many reasons why I would need to import that DVD from the States anyway. It comes down to convienience more than anything. If I buy something, why shouldn’t I be able to use it anywhere in the world, unless there is a practical reason why not.
Once you add on the cost of postage and packaging, it isn’t going to work out much cheaper to by a movie from the US anyway. And even if the exchange rate did make buying things from overseas a lot cheaper, I don’t hear companies complaining that books and audio CDs sold in all over the world sell poorly simply because people can also get them on Amazon.com. Why the exception with movies and games? Even if there was a standdown period where people had to wait a few months before the movies that they paid for are able to be used, that would at least control the market enough to stop importers from getting it before the domestic release.
And like you said, multizone DVD players already exist anyway. So why don’t movie companies get rid of zoning completely, or at least come up with a better compromise than we already have? Zoning does nothing to help the consumer who are the people the movies are created for in the first place, rather, it restricts the way they use something that they legally own.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea, except I wouldn’t want to lose the ability to connect to Xbox Live. Otherwise, it would be ideal.
