You may not be familiar with the term “release window”, but it’s the practice of delaying the release of (or never releasing) a product in a certain part of the world. It was first brought to my attention by DVDs—DVDs have a “region code” that is tied to players sold in each country. If you buy a DVD player or DVD in the United States or Canada, you most likely purchased a “Region 1” DVD. There are “Region ALL” discs that are allowed on any region player, but they’re somewhat rare. Your player must match the region code in order to play back that disc. So if you have a Region 1 player, you cannot play another country’s discs.
Lets say you live in the United States and decided to visit New Zealand. While you’re there you decide to purchase The Lord of the Rings on DVD. On the plane ride back to the States, you find your brand new DVD will not work in your laptop due to the region coding. Dumb.
There are a few reasons that the movie studios do this sort of segmentation, but one of the main reasons is to control what cost the market will bear, selling it for higher or lower prices in different regions of the world. Region codes also allow the movie studios to prevent release dates from being broken across countries; a film may come out in the U.S. earlier than say, China.
While I can understand why movie studios do this, it’s inherently stupid. When people have a demand for a product and the producers cannot supply that demand due to their artificial rules, some people are going to seek out alternate ways of getting that product. In DVD’s case, this means that people will buy “black market” discs or players to get around region coding, or go online and download the movie, etc..
Add in the news that two services I use, Netflix and RedBox, have made deals with a few movie studios to delay their films (up to a month) from being available on those services. I can’t totally fault Redbox and Netflix in this scenario because they are at the mercy of the movie studios, but this is ultimately bad for the consumer enitrely.
The reason for the delay? To try and encourage more DVD/Blu-Ray sales. This logic doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the reason I mentioned prior, causing consumers to seek out the material in other ways. Secondly, the movie studios are assuming that people want to buy these films on DVD/Blu-Ray in the first place. Let me fill you in on something, studios: most movies aren’t worth owning on DVD/Blu-Ray, and most people would rather rent than own!. Why do you think Redbox and Netflix have had such successful businesses?
I personally won’t be turning to sketchy methods to get my films; I’ll just wait the 30 days. But it’s important to send a message to the studios that these sort of artificial markets are not going to be tolerated for long by the consumers. With the transition to more digital means of getting our films (through Netflix streaming, Amazon Video on Demand, Zune Video Marketplace, etc.) the movie studios seem to be living in the past; they want to stick to the old mentality of trying to force the consumer to buy media in a package/format they don’t want. I think they’ll find it isn’t going to work. At least not for long.
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