Why Are Some Shows Restricted To Some Regions Only?

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other online video streaming companies are all the rage right now. It's not hard to see why because they make the ability to consume content at your leisure possible for the first time ever. It's a profitable yet loose way of allowing customers to view whatever it is they want to view, at anytime and anywhere. They are at the forefront of this technology that will one day be in almost every home in the world. It's only a matter of time because old media, i.e. traditional television, has set times and dates when you can watch their shows. Why do people have to stop their lives in order to catch the latest episode of the series they love? It doesn’t make any sense, which is why Netflix and others to make sense. They produce their own shows, such as Netflix and Narcos, Amazon Prime and The Grand Tour. And yet, even these services are actually in their infancy. Some shows are still restricted to particular regions and countries. So why is this?

Conflicting territories

All of the video streaming services are treated like a real-world business, despite their product being strictly online. Every country is split up into territories. This is because there are different companies that provide certain kind of content that is localized to those areas. It also makes sense, because one large territory would be chaos to manage and wouldn’t be respectful of the different cultures that exist within it. So, what you have is a licensing issue, whereby a company like Netflix has to go from region to region, trying to purchase licensing rights territory by territory. Location and popularity matter also because sometimes the lack of interest in a region may mean that purchasing the tv rights of shows for that region doesn’t make business sense. Sometimes this means that your region is left out of a particular show, while the others may be available. It's unfortunate but some shows just don’t do as well as others so fewer people will get to see them.

Is there a way around?

Sometimes, you can purchase shows that aren’t shown in your region. Of course, this kind of defeats the whole business model of paying a subscription fee and having access to everything. However if you really are that desperate to watch a show, you can fork out money to watch it per episode or just buy the whole series. On the other hand, you can, with a bit of ingenuity, bypass the regional restriction. One way you can do this is to learn how to stream PPV on Firestick or via other technology. This is an especially useful solution if you watch a lot of boxing or other sports which are often pay-per-view and may also be restricted by region. Beyond this, you can also bypass regional restrictions by using a VPN. A VPN can be used to identify your location as somewhere else other than where you really are, though be sure to read these vpn reviews and check out the features for each VPN service before choosing whether to purchase. You can buy a VPN annually or on a monthly basis. With a VPN, the mainframe network of a video streaming service like Netflix will recognize you as being in a region where they have bought rights and you can, as such, stream the show you’re looking for.