I thought the whole point of having regions was so that studios could release movies at different times without having to worry about them being shipped to different countries.
For example, a studio could show a movie in theaters in the United States in May and release it on DVD in November. Meanwhile in Mexico, that movie might not be released in theaters until October and still be showing in November. The studio wouldn’t want American DVD’s being shipped to Mexico and killing the theatrical ticket sales. So American DVD’s are Region 1 and Mexican DVD’s are Region 4 - an American DVD won’t play on a standard Mexican DVD player. This means that studios can release DVD’s in the United States without worrying about them showing up in Mexico.
But here in America, the Blu Ray release of a movie virtually always coincides with the DVD release. And while the United States and Mexico are in different DVD regions, they’re both in Blu Ray Region A. So American Blu Rays work just fine on Mexican Blu Ray players (and vice versa).
It seems strange that the studios would go to the trouble of setting up a system of regions and then sabotage it by changing them. Why didn’t they just do the obvious and use the existing DVD regions when they began making Blu Rays? Why start a new regional system that subverts the whole reason for having regions?
When DVDs came out sometime in the mid-1990s, movie premieres were globally staggered for various reasons such as promotion, marketing, localization, etc. As you mentioned, movie studios protected what was shown where by introducing region codes so that DVDs released in one region couldn’t be viewed in another region where the movie was about to be released or still showing.
However, when Blu-rays were introduced to the market, broadband and internet speeds had advanced significantly compared to the DVD era and people were downloading (pirated) movies without having to wait for the official physical product. Studios realized how much they were losing out and now have more and more coordinated worldwide releases, especially for blockbuster titles.
Region control on physical media made less and less sense and the six DVD regions were simplified to three Blu-ray regions, but even that is largely symbolic. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most of the major U.S. studios don’t bother with region coding on most of their Blu-ray releases. I remember reading somewhere that only 20th Century Fox bothers to add region coding.
Studios would never admit to it but they realize that trying to control content by region in this day and age of technology is largely ineffective. With streaming media growing to someday match and overtake physical media, region coding will completely disappear and new DRM systems that limit the number of times something is viewed or copied will take its place.
** Saturn Dreams** has it. Earlier movies were released overseas months or years after release in the US. Nowadays movie are released more or less at the same time, with usually just a few days difference.
The difficulty I’m seeing is that there were three possibilities, ranked in order of how difficult they were to set up:
Don’t bother having any regions.
Use the existing regional system.
Set up a new regional system.
So why did studios skip over the two easier alternatives and pick the one that required the most effort? If regional coding was pointless, they should have picked #1. If regional coding still served a need, they should have picked #2.
Region coding is not completely pointless. They can still use it to restrict certain content like extras and bonus content to specific areas. They can also use it to control pricing to increase their revenue. Region coding still serves a need but that need is gradually fading to the point that many Hollywood studios do not bother encoding their discs with region codes.
What’s interesting to note is that the rival HD-DVD format did not have a region code system and still enjoyed studio support. So why did the Blu-ray format maintain the system, albeit a simplified one? Like I said in an earlier post, it’s largely symbolic. It was mandatory for DVD discs to carry a region code program because the hardware would need to verify it before it could play the disc. For Blu-rays, adding the region code program is optional because instead of the hardware doing the checking, it’s the program on the disc (if it exists), checking for hardware compatibility.
I think they probably region coded as a compromise. The alignment with PAL and NTSC makes sense, too, since the framerate distinction is no longer there. (You can encode a Blu-ray in PAL 1080i50, but that’s rarely done except with certain PAL TV shows. Using interlacing looks nasty on LCD.)
The majority of releases are region free, but Fox, for example, is always region locked. With studios disagreeing, I guess they though it made sense to find a middle ground. My guess is that the designers wanted to get rid of it altogether.
It’s like how the standard HD aspect ratio is a compromise. Filmmakers would have preferred they pick a single common aspect ratio, but the engineers instead tried to pick a ratio that would minimize the amount of black bars for all ratios. Problem is, as filmmakers note, most people don’t like black bars. So filmmakers had to adjust to an aspect ratio they didn’t like or crop and/or stretch their films when they release them to home video.
The designers of this whole thing seemed to think compromise was always superior.
SLIGHT TANGENT: I was appalled to learn this when they installed our large plasma wall-mounted TV. We put on CASABLANCA to test that it worked, and the kid doing the installing had it set to stretch the picture to fit the screen. We objected, we didn’t want to watch a fat Humphrey Bogart. and he didn’t understand why not, he’d never had a customer ask for proper screen ratios before and he didn’t know how to change the setting. Sigh. We had to call the store to complain and have them send out another installer (damned if I could figure it out, either.)
That’s weird, it’s usually very simple. However, there are two settings - one telling the Blu-Ray player what shape your TV is, and one in your TV for all signals (game, cable, DVD, etc).
