“We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.”
What the hell?
Presumably, they don’t want to pay for bandwidth usage for people outside the scope of their service area.
Holy Crap! You should see what you’re missing! :eek:
Sorry, couldn’t resist. In addition to the reason Q.E.D. gives maybe this way they can also avoid the slight chance of potentially offending or pissing off people in other countries who can’t patronize their product anyway? Just a guess. I mean, there seems to be only downside for them if they let everyone in the world access their site if most of them can’t watch the network.
I think there are rules for who can broadcast what in which countries. Each country has their own rights and contracts that need signing and paying for before they can broadcast any given show. I guess it’s an attempt to limit we foreigners from seeing something before it’s locally scheduled release. Much like region coding of DVDs is supposed to.
Services like Showtime are not available in a lot of countries. I think even Canada is one of them(?). But people with illegal sat. hookups might want to check what’s on. So why should Showtime provide this info to pirates?
IMHO, Showtime is doing itself a disservice. I needed to look up some corporate information about them and one of their productions that is filmed in here Canada because we were about to do business with them.
I got the “you’re outside the U.S., go away, neener, neener, neener” message. Okay, fine. That’s going to screw up several people. I couldn’t even get a proper mailing address from their site and had to call a Canadian-based music supervisor to get the very basic info. Basically, some of their own crews don’t have access. Not cool. Foreign investor? No access.
While their services may not be available outside the U.S. They are also messing up info for forgeign investors, non-U.S. businesses and entertainment companies that work with them, and press that would have legitimate reasons to need to look up stuff about their company.
There is plenty of general info they could make available. Spoiler info for program already broadcast in the U.S. but not in other territories can be protected easily enough without locking out the entire site.
Here’s a guess or two:
They’re trying to avoid being liable for posting content that violates the law in some foreign country.
Maybe they’re trying to avoid having to comply with european privacy laws?
It works from Italy.
It didn’t work for me here in the UK either, but routing through this proxy worked just fine.
Useful for getting to sites blocked by corporate firewalls too 
.
If you haven’t already noticed, virtually all web sites are designed and managed by idiots. PHBs everywhere. Common sense, logic, user functionality, etc. are rarely a concern. E.g., “before using our site, please tell us a little more about yourself.” But none of them notice that most visitors are 5 year old CEOs making more than $500,000 a year and live in Schenectady NY (zip code 12345).
“Logical web design” is virtually a myth.