So I’m out of the country and fire up amazon prime
Clearly it knows who I am because you have to log in… My iPad is a US iPad and my account is based in the US. but when you’re physically outside of the US, you can only access about half of the available content. And it doesn’t appear that I all of a sudden have access to different content specifically for this market (though I could be wrong…) What’s the point of restricting me from watching whatever random movie I want to watch on my own personal device?
I think Amazon (and Netflix, etc.) would love to not have to expose you to this BS. But I’m sure their licensing agreements with the content owners and studios prevent them from doing this. I think behind the scenes the content owners have all sorts of international distribution arrangements with various players that could be compromised if you could watch it anywhere.
I’m not an expert, but it kind of has a new versus legacy model clash about it.
Distribution rights are most likely “Rights to broadcast in that country,” not “rights to broadcast in that country except for people visiting from somewhere else,” so you’re not likely to get anything that is US-only just based on your account.
However, people end up trying to evade that via VPN and other methods to try and hide their location, so many places also check your account/payment location. Which means you are likely to get the worst of both worlds when traveling.
An example of how messed up things are are the rules in France for movies to qualify for French film awards like Cannes. A movie cannot be available to stream for three years after release to theaters.
Real jerks, IMHO. So good luck trying to watch a newer US Cannes entry in France.
I suspect that if one were able to get access to a country’s licensed content merely by having an account address/credit card from that country, there would be quite a market for proxy accounts. It would be to trivially easy to con the restriction.
Instead there’s a strong market for VPNs, which are somewhat more tricky to use than just using someone else’s login. Not too much, but I suspect it’s the more elusive of the two possible ways to “trick” the system.
As others have mentioned it comes down to licensing rights for any piece of content, and the legacy issue before streaming became accessible anywhere in the world.
Going back to pre-streaming days, when studios/producers sold the explotation rights for movies particularly they were sliced up into various territories, so say North America, Latin America, UK, China, South East Asia etc. The purchaser of the rights were restricted from displaying that piece of media in the agreed countries/territories only.
As Netflix/Amazon started to acquire content they were theoretically restricted to what they could allow their subscribers from different countries to watch. A major change that is now in evidence though, particularly with exclusive content is that Netflix for example will purchase the worldwide rights. Hence “Netflix Originals” are not region locked.
FYI, a few years back content providers were up in arms about cross-territory use of Netflix via VPN’s, so much so that Netflix restricited any VPN from accessing the content on their service. (I believe there’s an occasional work around, but in general they don’t work)