Locked Out

Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture

Evan Elkins

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479853465
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A rare insight into how industry practices like regional restrictions have shaped global media culture in the digital era

“This content is not available in your country.” At some point, most media consumers around the world have run into a message like this. Whether trying to watch a DVD purchased during a vacation abroad, play an imported Japanese video game, or listen to a Spotify library while traveling, we are constantly reminded of geography’s imprint on digital culture. We are locked out.

Despite utopian hopes of a borderless digital society, DVDs, video games, and streaming platforms include digital rights management mechanisms that block media access within certain territories. These technologies of “regional lockout” are meant first and foremost to keep the entertainment industries’ global markets distinct. But they also frustrate consumers and place territories on a hierarchy of global media access. Drawing on extensive research of media-industry strategies, consumer and retailer practices, and media regulation, Locked Out explores regional lockout’s consequences for media around the globe. Power and capital are at play when it comes to who can consume what content and who can be a cultural influence. Looking across digital technologies, industries, and national contexts, Locked Out argues that the practice of regional lockout has shaped and reinforced global hierarchies of geography and culture.

1

DVD Region Codes

Technical Standards and Geocultural Status

In 2009, British prime minister Gordon Brown paid a state visit to US president Barack Obama. As the story goes, the two administrations traded gifts, with Brown offering Obama a penholder carved from an antislavery ship and Obama giving Brown a collection of twenty-five “classic” American films on DVD. However, when Brown finally returned to 10 Downing Street, he discovered that the DVDs were unplayable in his British DVD player. Purchased in the United States, they were encoded Region One. Brown’s player, manufactured in the UK, was designated Region Two, and thus would not play the American DVDs. The leaders of two of the most powerful states in the world (or at least the staffers put in charge of finding gifts) had been stymied by the DVD region code system, which maintains established film-distribution routes by ensuring that discs from one part of the world do not work on players from another.1

Silly and inconsequential as it may seem, this story illustrates a few things about DVD region codes. For one, it characterizes a certain style of reporting that portrays region codes as a mechanism that frustrates and irritates non-US users primarily, even those who hold high status.2 Even if the story is indeed suspicious (after all, it does seem unlikely that 10 Downing Street would not have access to a region-free DVD player), its presence in the tabloids indicates that the British government would not find it politically savory to admit that it surreptitiously accessed intellectual property not meant for British viewers. Additionally, it hints at the power of private, multinational corporations, more than the state, in controlling the global flow of entertainment culture. A number of media companies and industrial consortia developed the region code system, with the state taking a back seat during this process of technological regulation. In other words, Brown’s PR machine would not likely plant a story about how he was frustrated by a form of national or transnational regulation; rather, Hollywood (and, by extension, the United States) could remain the culprit. This speaks to a final point: that DVD region codes have, for nearly two decades now, represented a landscape on which cultural difference, and the disagreements and inequalities in geocultural capital that can attend that difference, have been articulated. As the British tabloids were quick to point out, Obama’s dysfunctional gift paled in comparison to Brown’s more thoughtful present. Here, Brown figures as an avatar of British viewers frustrated by region codes: a relatable victim of a Hollywood-driven form of economic and cultural discrimination.3

How did an entertainment platform become a battleground for even mild public tussles between closely allied nations? To begin to answer this question, this chapter outlines a cultural history and analysis of the DVD region code. It shows that region codes perpetuated and updated for the digital age a dominant logic in the cultural industries: that world regions are differentiated spatial markets to be placed on hierarchies of economic and cultural power. By carving up the world into six geographic regions, with DVDs from one region unable to play on the DVD players of another, the region code scheme retained the disjunctive, market-driven relationships that were already familiar to global home video distribution.4 This all occurred during a historical moment marked by intertwining forces of media globalization, digitization, and privatized technological standard setting and (de)regulation. While dominant stories about these forces suggested they would all work mutually to expand the distribution of filmed entertainment, region codes show that powerful actors tried to ensure that media distribution followed controlled paths directed by digital blockades.

This chapter argues that region codes’ hierarchy of segmentation worked both technologically as digital regulation and discursively as a system of representation. In its technological function, the region code system limited the affordances of the DVD in a way that retained traditionally segmented entertainment markets. Region codes’ representational dimensions appear in industry memos, instruction manuals, maps, and news stories, all of which employ shared understandings of geocultural difference and discrimination in order to make sense of region codes. Industry players draw on dominant ideas about certain countries’ and regions’ levels of geocultural capital when discussing region codes with one another, trade reporters deploy cultural shorthand and even stereotypes to help explain region codes, and users invoke charges of cultural discrimination as a way of protesting region codes. Thus, this chapter deepens our understanding of digital media regulation by emphasizing how regulation can reveal and produce discrimination and difference in global media economies. Most broadly, DVD region codes provide a series of stories about the cultural implications of global entertainment distribution during a time when cultural industries were transitioning to digital delivery technologies. Tracing involvement by global film and television studios, private and state regulatory bodies, media industry consortia, the computing and IT industries, consumer electronics manufacturers, trade presses, and consumer rights groups, this chapter shows media convergence at work in all its messiness.5

But why bother writing about the DVD at all? After all, many inside and outside the media industries are quick to point out its obsolescence. Part of my motivation is to outline how region codes institutionalized a particular approach to maintaining the globe’s divisibility in an era of digital entertainment. While certain forms of lockout and regionally specific technological standards have always existed, media technologies such as the DVD and early video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System were among the first to include components that intentionally locked out users from other regions. Thus, the DVD region code was a key origin point of the last two decades’ debates over regional lockout and digital media technology. It is also worth pointing out that despite pronouncements of the DVD’s death at the hands of Blu-ray and online streaming, the technology is still very much alive, even if sales have dipped.6 The suggestion that the DVD will be (or has already been) replaced by Blu-ray and streaming video carries classist and Western-centric assumptions. Namely, taking the habits of users who gravitate toward emergent, top-of-the-line technologies as the norm privileges those who are not only upper or middle class, but are often constructed in trade discourse as young, white men from the Global North.7 Taking for granted the erroneous assumption that the world’s media practices resemble those of a privileged minority risks reproducing accounts that ignore the continued existence of supposedly “residual” cultural forms.

That DVDs have enjoyed longer life spans in various parts of the world highlights another crucial point: the DVD region code system did not wholly shape the flow of home video around the globe. Indeed, methods of circumventing these forms of regulation always immediately follow their development, and a dominant narrative produced by media industries, technology manufacturers, and users throughout the history of the DVD is that region codes simply did not work. Informal or semiformal economies of media distribution, which exist outside and at times in direct violation of the state-recognized and -sanctioned media economies that adopt such forms of regulation, are quite widespread (or even, as Ramon Lobato argues, the dominant norm) around the world.8 Many gray markets throughout parts of Asia and Africa, for instance, sustain distribution economies built in part around the DVD.9 So, to argue that the DVD region code completely and utterly served its function to direct global media flows would be to adopt a view that is both technologically determinist and Hollywood-centric.

Still, even if region codes did not function as ideally as Hollywood had hoped, they worked well enough to irritate many users and help studios maintain some semblance of market segmentation. Furthermore, region codes’ cultural effects are apparent in their promotion of division and discrimination in the global media ecosystem. Region codes characterize what Roger Silverstone called media’s “boundary work,” or the multitude of ways media systems generate and sustain lines of geographic, political, and cultural difference.10 At the macro level, media’s boundary work reinforces borders of nation and community by providing infrastructural and formal means through which we construct communities and include and exclude people from those communities.11 However, region codes do not merely inscribe difference at this broader level of spatial relations. At the micro level, or the level attuned to media consumers’ everyday experiences with texts, boundary work inscribes difference within media texts and discourse. Region codes assert geocultural difference at the macro level by building digital walls between territories and at the micro level through their textual and visual representations in forms like maps, industry talk, and user discourse. Region codes shape the material geographic flows of media around the world, and they offer a discursive landscape on which various players discuss and contest the relationships among home video, digital media, and geocultural difference.

The Region Code System

Before going too much further, it is worth explaining what region codes actually are and how they work. In order to ensure that DVD players from one part of the world cannot play DVDs from another, most discs include a flag on their software that a player from the same region must read before it will play the DVD.12 Region codes are officially called Regional Playback Control (RPC), and they are part of the DVD’s anti-copying technological architecture called the Content Scrambling System (CSS). CSS (not to be confused with the identically abbreviated web-design language) was developed and standardized by the DVD Forum, a consortium of studios and electronics manufacturers. Currently, a California-based nonprofit corporation called the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) controls and licenses the technology.13

The system requires a DVD to be encoded as one of eight possible regions, with six of these corresponding to different geographic territories around the world. There is also a technological reason motivating the use of eight regions. Since eight bits fit on a byte, and each region flag takes up one bit, the regional playback mechanism as a whole fits on one byte.14 The regions are as follows:

1. 1: Canada, United States, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, and some islands in the Pacific
2. 2: Japan, Europe (including Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Balkans), South Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East (including Iran and Egypt)
3. 3: Southeast and East Asia (including Indonesia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Macau)
4. 4: Australia, New Zealand, South America, most of Central America, Western New Guinea, and most of the South Pacific
5. 5: Most of Africa, Russia (and former Russian states), Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and North Korea
6. 6: China and Tibet
7. 7: Reserved
8. 8: Special nontheatrical venues (airplanes, cruise ships, hotels)

DVD region codes came about at a moment when global audiences were increasingly important to Hollywood, which needed to figure out how to exploit these markets while maintaining control over distribution. A major part of this global expansion was the development of the overseas home video market, which by 1989 had become the top source of international revenue for the Hollywood studios.15 The mid-1990s saw a slowdown in global video sales, but the introduction of the DVD in 1996 led to a second boom—this time in DVD hardware and software.16 For Hollywood, this growing global market was both a boon and a potential new crisis of unchecked distribution.

In this context, the studios encouraged the development of some form of regional control in order to preserve their theatrical and home video release schedules. Each territory, placement on a network, or release period represents a window for the studios to exploit, and Hollywood’s theatrical distribution strategies had long operated by dividing markets by space and time.17 While the specific parameters of this separation have shifted over time due to post–studio era industrial changes and the rise of home video, the general philosophy of geographic discrimination remained. At the time of DVD’s development, Hollywood operated almost exclusively under a “tiered” or “staggered” form of windowing, where theaters in certain markets would run a film before studios released it in other markets (e.g., second-run theaters, theaters in different regions of the world, home video).18 Because Hollywood often put a film out on video in the United States before giving it a theatrical debut overseas, there was a danger of parallel imports, or products meant for one geographic market introduced into another, usually illegally. In theory, DVD region codes would allow the studios to maintain these staggered windows by ensuring that DVDs of a film would not appear in a market while that film was still in theaters. Region codes could also maintain price discrimination practices, where DVDs varied in cost significantly among different markets. If a Region Four DVD from Mexico will not play in a Region One player from the United States, this would prevent a northward flood of comparatively less expensive discs.19

With these motives on the part of studios, region codes help maintain conditions for an industry orthodoxy that former Hollywood executive Jeff Ulin refers to as, naturally enough, Ulin’s Rule. According to Ulin’s Rule, “content value is optimized by exploiting the factors of time, repeat consumption (platforms), exclusivity, and differential pricing.”20 By helping Hollywood maintain temporal lags and spatial borders between different windows, region codes ideally would ensure that distributors and retailers could keep markets isolated enough to control prices within them.21 Furthermore, since different companies own home video distribution rights to a film in different territories, region codes help these companies keep control over distribution to their respective markets.22 Whether space, time, or price, region codes were meant to shore up corporate control over variables in distribution that threatened to become less predictable in a digital era. The result is that some parts of the world (usually North America) have access to the most content in the best quality, thus enjoying the geocultural capital that comes with existing as a premier market. In addition to the more apparent spatial/geographic disjuncture (i.e., that only certain privileged territories can have Region One DVDs), there is a temporal dimension to this. Because DVD releases of Hollywood films are generally hyped first and most intensely in Region One, other territories are left behind in a media environment where value is placed on early access. If there is a certain cultural cachet that comes with owning a product first, or even at all, then the staggered release dates that region codes attempt to preserve represent a hierarchy of global difference inscribed in the technical standards of the DVD. As this might suggest, region codes have been received with different degrees of irritation, apathy, and ignorance in various parts of the world. While the privileged position of the United States as Region One means that region codes have gone largely unnoticed in America, except by cinephiles or cultists who seek out differently coded DVDs, region codes proved to be more of a nuisance in much of the rest of the world. As we will see below, region codes (for both DVDs and console games) proved quite controversial in Australia and New Zealand. Throughout much of Asia, however, the significant presence o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Regional Lockout as Technology, Distribution, and Culture
• 1. DVD Region Codes: Technical Standards and Geocultural Status
• 2. Console Games: How Regional Lockout Shaped the Video Game Industry
• 3. Video on Demand: Geoblocking, Borders, and Geocultural Anxieties
• 4. Digital Music: Regional Lockout and Online Listening
• 5. Region-Free Media: Collecting and Selling Cultural Status
• Conclusion: The End of Geoblocking? or, Region-Free Media Literacy
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author