Welcome to tangent city, pop. me
*****SPAM***** Massive amounts of Women
That subject line was part of my morning email-checking experience, and I felt like sharing it with everyone. Doesn’t it have a cozy, “All Your Base” sort of vibe?
It made me think a bit about TV standards (shows you where my head is at). Some countries use the older American NTSC standard, and some use Germany’s improved PAL standard. Nowadays, most video gear sold around the world will play either NTSC or PAL, no problem…
…except in the United States. Our government actively discourages the sale of dual-system gear. Effectively, that keeps us NTSC-only. And, not content with that barrier, we also require the DVD players sold here to use “region coding”–meaning that they refuse to play DVDs from outside the U.S. and Canada. How did this happen?
Well, I think it’s useful to look at the experiment France tried in the the 1960s. To reduce commercial competition from foreign TV, their government added a proprietary tweak to the PAL standard and renamed it SECAM, effectively granting monopoly control to French broadcasters. (The scheme was thwarted by video gear manufacturers, who didn’t want to have to make whole separate product lines for the Francophone world. Eventually, they figured out the SECAM tweak and made sure their regular PAL products could undo it. Poof–the monopoly was gone.)
Now, our own video isolation wasn’t deliberately planned from the start, but our government’s decision to maintain it accomplishes the same purpose. It costs money for media companies to convert from one format to another, cutting into the profit they could make from selling a video in another country. If we had video players that could handle stuff from anywhere in the world, Chinese- and Spanish-language movies would quickly pop up on Blockbuster shelves in big cities across the U.S.–the customer base there would be too large to ignore.
As it is, small media companies in other countries find the expense of conversion daunting. Format conversion becomes a kind of “media tariff,” a barrier that keeps out foreign competitors. And that’s exactly how Jack Valenti (R.I.P.) and co. like it.
For a bit of proof, just look at the foreign videos that do make it into our Blockbusters. The enormous popularity of Japanese film and TV over here just wouldn’t be possible without a shared format–Japan and the U.S. are both on NTSC. Any little media company there can release its video in the U.S., on the cheap. And it’s that saturation that really causes a cultural exchange to get going in earnest.
So…this is just a really roundabout way of saying, the phrase “Massive amounts of women” sounds very, very anime. And a common television standard is the reason why I can think that thought today.
March 25th, 2004 at 7:52 am
So, that is interesting since I have wondered why some of those things are the way they are. But what was the actual reason that dual-system gear became discouraged and region encoding became required? It is entirely believable to me that those regulations were put in place due to pressure from the domestic media industry, but normally when laws like that are passed, there is at least some suggestion of a rational purpose.
March 25th, 2004 at 9:38 am
I don’t know about the video format wars, but I’ve heard these excuses for the region-locking of movies and video games:
Movie release dates are often staggered by country, with movies appearing on video in one country before they’re in theaters in another.
They want to quarantine China and the like into a “rampant piracy region” (as if they can’t get their hands on multi-region gear).
With video games at least, different companies often have the publishing rights for different countries. So if I import a game rather than buying it from the local publisher, my money is theoretically going to the wrong place.
March 25th, 2004 at 7:03 pm
So yeah, I agree that region coding had pretty benign origins as a copy-protection scheme. The American movie industry–like French TV back in the day–overlooked the fact that such plans depend on the cooperation of video gear makers who are, generally, neither American nor French, and have their own interests to protect. A video player that works with NTSC, PAL, and SECAM alike (and ignores ill-considered anti-piracy schemes) is attractive to consumers all over the world, and saves manufacturers the trouble of making different models for different countries. So that’s exactly what they sell.
Except in the U.S., which is a big enough market to get special treatment–NTSC-only gear. If I understand right, our situation is not enforced by government decree–it’s enforced by “strategic lawsuit.” This is where a private party tries to prevent something that’s actually legal by filing enormous numbers of lawsuits, creating a serious practical delay for anybody who crosses them. Now, using lawsuits for this purpose is itself illegal, but if the government refuses to prosecute, they are effectively endorsing the private party.
Basically, the “Mickey Mouse lobby” files a frivolous suit against anybody selling a cheap multistandard player in a mass-market venue like Circuit City, WalMart, or Best Buy. (This wasn’t even an issue till recently–before digital video, NTSC-PAL conversion wasn’t something you could just stick in a cheap consumer VCR.) Since video gear makers are businesses, not free-speech crusaders, they do the math and usually find it’s cheaper to make a U.S.-only model than face the court challenge (even though they would probably win).
Mickey Mouse’s resources are still finite, so they can’t sue everybody…they tend not to go after pricier gear sold through web or mail-order. If you’re willing to pay a couple hundred bucks’ markup, you can easily get an international gadget that plays PAL, ignores regions and Macrovision, and so on. But for the average customer comparing that to an otherwise-identical $80 model, there’s not going to be much of a contest.
My theory is that Mickey’s primary motivation isn’t preventing piracy. (If the movie industry were so scared of piracy, why would they be attempting to end distribution in 35mm film? A format that can only be duplicated in a handful of industrial labs nationwide and is transported by truck in big ol’ steel cans is a hell of a lot more secure than a wee little terabyte Firewire drive.) I think they want to protect their market share–they’ve found themself in the unusual position of being able to lock out a substantial share of the foreign home video market, and they wanna keep it that way.
Yeah, we still get plenty of foreign films, but they’re the big-budget kind, the ones whose backers can shell out the cash to vault our little barriers. I mean, a couple months ago, I saw this wonderful pre-revolution ’60s Iranian movie, shot in a dark, shaky Lars-von-Trier sort of style, about a TV executive who is cursed by his own private Mongol Horde. (It’s a small Horde, twelve or so guys in armor and fur caps, who come charging in at inopportune moments, such as when he’s with his lady friend. Of course, only he can see them.) It’s never been released on NTSC video…an Iranian professor here dubbed it from his personal collection. Sure, it’s too weird for wide release, but there’s a couple million Persian-speaking people in the U.S. who I bet would pick that one up if they chanced upon it at the video store….