Re: Censorship by the BBC?

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

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.

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