Geographic Restrictions Might Lead to Piracy

The problem of geographic restrictions is a real pain in the back for a great number of video sites users but the surprise comes with the somewhat ignorance (tough I’m not sure this is the right word) of the sites employing such restrictions- they are actually doing themselves a big disadvantage. Techdirt has posted the view of one of their readers affected by the aforementioned restriction. You have to give him credit indeed – what he writes here includes many of Internet users out there. His name is Santiago Crespo and this is what he writes:

I live in Argentina, in South America and am an avid Heroes and House follower, but there's a problem watching those shows in our side of the world. Big network subsidiaries offer cable access to American TV shows, but for some unknown reason they can take up to six months to subtitle them in Spanish, and therefore we're stuck watching last season episodes all the time. I don't need subtitles to watch the series, since my grasp of the English language is decent enough to understand what the show is about.

But every time you want to use any legal video site such as Hulu, the NBC website, Sling.com or even some bits of YouTube (Geo-restricted music videos), it will show an error message saying you're "geographically challenged." So instead of geolocalizing ads (as Google does, since I get ads for Deremate.com, a Latin American eBay clone here on Techdirt) they leave me no choice but to head over to the pirate bay to get my fix ad-free.

And even if your comprehension of English isn't good enough to watch the shows downloaded from Bittorrent, every single TV episode gets fansubbed within 24 hours of airing. I think the big networks are wasting a revenue opportunity by limiting who can watch their shows (6 months from now if you have cable) instead of letting you watch them on-line (unlimited audience potential) with some geo-located ads.

The guy lays cards on the table – while the things are like this either because of some being stuck in old times and not so smart geographic "rights" issues being applied or because some agreements only grants the companies the right to broadcast content in particular geographical areas, the fact that efforts to change them are still not that obvious lets me confused. In my opinion, the content owners should have come up with a solution by now because with the given situation things are not moving in their favour but rather enforcing the tendency towards piracy.