I follow some shows I like on Facebook. And of course they regularly spit promo material at me. But some of it can’t be seen due to my geographic region, namely Canada. Hawaii 5-0 is the worst offender. I’m trying to watch a commercial on CBS.com for the show. I’m not allow to watch the commercial because I live in Canada. The legal and financial intricacies of why I’m forbidden from watching a commercial escape me. Especially since I can wait a day and watch the same commercial on YouTube. What’s the deal here? I would have thought they’d want all eyes on their promos, regardless of where those eyes are.
Total WAGs:
The trailer contains music or other material that they don’t have the rights to show outside the U.S.
They have a deal with a Canadian TV channel that only they may promote the show in Canada.
Edit: Their target market is the U.S. and they want to save on bandwidth costs.
“This video is not available in your geographic region”
As you have noted, it is available in your geographic region. Just not from them.
The only people I’ve seen so far who have an honest message are the South Park people who say something like (bolding mine) “We can’t show you this video right now because of contractual obligations we have with distributors. It sucks, we know.”
You can’t watch the promo videos on the itv Primeval website if you’re in the US, either. Which is odd, because they do deign to let us buy the DVDs from them.
They don’t want people who are very unlikely to be paying for their shows to be able to watch their shows for free. It’s too difficult (technically or legally) to separate the promos from the shows.
That’s my reasoning, anyway. It doesn’t make terrific sense, since, especially if they bundle ads into the streaming shows let alone the promos, they have at least as good a paid audience as with stuff shown on TV. But the cable companies (or whoever) might well complain.
And stuff that’s legal in one country might not be legal in another. Checking that something is legal in multiple jurisdictions would cost a lot of money, even if you were to only do that for the major overseas markets.
You’d think that this is something that the TV companies would eventually find a way around. But then we still have DVDs encoded for only one region.