funsec mailing list archives
Re: Censorship by the BBC?
From: Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:22:51 +0000 (GMT)
On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Richard M. Smith wrote:
Hi, One of my favorite shows on television was the 1980 BBC mini-series called "Oppenheimer". It is a docudrama that tells the history of the Manhattan Project. I have been waiting forever for the series to come out on tape or DVD. The BBC finally released the series on a 3-set DVD this past summer. The set is only being sold in the UK, but this is no big deal in the age of Amazon and FedEx. I was able to order the set from Amazon UK and had it sent to the U.S. in a couple of days. However, for reasons unknown, the DVDs are region coded so that it can be played only in Europe. This form of censorship makes no sense at all especially from a news organization like the BBC. Although, the Oppenheimer DVDs won't play on my regular DVD player, they play just fine on my computer with a number of different DVD player software packages. It's nice to see that the computer industry is not buying into the silly idea of region-coding censorship. Here's a bit more about the Oppenheimer DVD set at Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/ya26x5 Richard M. Smith http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com
It isn't censorship. When we started to sell Dr Solomon's antivirus in the USA, we were told that we had to sell it at a price that was competitive with other, much cheaper, products. We then had to consider whether to drop our price in other countries to match the US price. If we had, the loss of revenue would have been so great, that the revenue from the US wouldn't have made up for it. Also, the retailers in other countries would have been very angry at us, if we'd dropped the price. So, we sold it at one price in the US, and a rather higher price in other countries. Then, of course, people would buy the US version (which was identiceal to the UK version, apart from the spelling in the manual) and import it into the UK. So, I know the issue that they're trying to handle. The purpose of the different "regions" on DVD, is to stop people buying a DVD where it's cheapest, and get them to buy the higher-priced (but identical) version instead. People who buy the cheaper version and import it, are called "Grey-marketers", an epithet that sounds like they're doing something naughty, which they aren't. My DVD player (and I think most others) is "multi-region". It was shipped as one region only, but a simple setup change meant it could play any region DVD. So, it isn't censorship, it's a marketing thing called "segmenting the market". Use Google if you don't know how to set your DVD for multi-region, there's probably a way. _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- Censorship by the BBC? Richard M. Smith (Dec 15)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Drsolly (Dec 15)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Florian Weimer (Dec 16)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Drsolly (Dec 16)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Valdis . Kletnieks (Dec 18)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Drsolly (Dec 18)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Florian Weimer (Dec 16)
- Re: Censorship by the BBC? Drsolly (Dec 15)