Amazon UK now putting "Region Free" in some titles

[pro-bassoonist]

Originally Posted by The Driver

How or why? Maybe the same, because as I mentioned -information- people will learn there's 'locked' content and those people will want to see what they're missing and this alone may move along the multiregion player market. DVD was multiregion mass market within months and Blu-ray is dragging its feet. Ergo region coding will be weakened as it is now with DVD players.

I was multiregion day 1 as I like choice and don't like studios like Sony abusing locked content when it suits them in their market and where they can release [essentially] ABC in markets where they don't or didn't pay for the rights. That's wrong and I'll decide where my money goes, thank you.

I don't wish to get into this debate because I think that at this point it makes little sense, but you seem to be misinformed about a couple of things:

1. There was never a mass multi-region DVD market. On the hardware side of things, well into 1999/2000 there was a limited number of European players that could playback Region-1 or Region-3 content (much later on UK distributors in particular started coding some of their releases for Regions 2 and 4).

2. Contrary to the notion that Region-locking is anti-cosumer, it actually very much benefits the consumer. Because of region-coding sublicensing is possible in a number of smaller markets, and because of sublicensing (often meaning selling restricted product) a lot of local releases are possible. On the other hand, without region-locking a very large chunk of content would simply not be available to the consumer (Japanese content and Japanese distributors's attitude towards region-locking immediately come to mind).

Really, your understanding of region-locking seems to begin and end with your assumption that it only affects what you can play on your machine, when in reality often times region-locking also determines whether there is actually content for you to play.

A regionless market without content, or severely restricted content, is just about the most anti-cosumer scenario that you could have.

Pro-B