About 3 years ago, way before the internet TV revolution had taken off, I noticed a number of people swarming around foreign TV stations that were broadcasting football (soccer) matches or other sporting events over the internet.
When I first saw this I thought it was the beginning of something great, the breakdown of territories by broadcasting TV worldwide via the internet.
Today this phenomenon is still rife with sites like YouTube sharing video worldwide and the countless video blogs and web TV channels that reach a global internet audience.
Boxing people in with country blocks
Unfortunately there has been a number of websites implementing country blocks such as with online American Dad Episodes and NBC TV Shows that are shown online.
While I completely understand this is because of licensing restrictions I just can’t help but feel it is putting people back into their closed country boxes.
The spread of information, culture and entertainment should be global and restricting content to particular countries is working against the evolution of communication.
It’s all about the money
With regular TV broadcasting it was a necessity to deliver television on a territorial basis due limited broadcasting real estate, be it the analog air waves, satellite DBS Ku-band frequency or something else.
The internet is a completely different story as broadcasting worldwide over the internet sees little disadvantages, especially with the ability to target adverts to people within different countries.
The only disadvantage remains in potential lost revenues as content owners can receive more in licensing revenue by licensing to different territories.
That would be fine if every country could access the same videosbe it through different providers, but that is not happening since a lot of the content that appears online is only available in one country.
The end result is piracy
By restricting access to video in certain countries it just fuels the desire for piracy. TVUPlayer is extremely popular for this reason alone.
If piracy flourishes then everyone loses. The consumer loses out on higher quality video and accessibility and the content owners lose out by having their videos stolen.
While the closed minded traditional broadcasters and content owners can stick with trying to box people into their countries, they’ll lose out to piracy while paving a solid path for new video producers and broadcasters to adopt a worldwide audience.
