DVD Region Codes

Chapter 1 explores regional lockout’s assemblage of technology, distribution, regulation, and culture through the DVD region code. In order to preserve traditional market segmentation practices, Hollywood convinced consumer electronics manufacturers to develop a DRM system wherein DVDs and DVD players are assigned a numerical “region code” based on their respective geographic territories. The codes in the software and hardware must match before the DVD will play. Chapter 1 details the DVD region code’s history, showing how the system was put in place and governed through complex negotiations and alignments among content creators, electronics manufacturers, and governing bodies. The chapter argues that the system is not only a hard-nosed form of technological and distributional control but also a system of symbolic global representation that clusters certain territories together and ranks those clusters within economic and cultural hierarchies.

Region-Free Media

Chapter 5 explores media free of regional lockout, focusing in particular on region-free DVD. The chapter begins with an analysis of region code circumvention and region-free DVD use by diasporic video retailers in the United States. Interviews with video store owners and employees reveal how region-free DVD can represent both a bottom-up challenge to dominant media industries’ distribution routes as well as a more everyday practice of making cultural resources available to localized diasporic communities. The chapter then explores the use of region-free DVD by cinephiles and film cultists, showing that region-free DVD cultures can also reflect a seemingly contradictory blend of cosmopolitanism and cultural dominance. Ultimately, this chapter argues that while region-free DVD can reflect an oppositional and transgressive orientation toward oppressive global cultural industries, region-free media’s cultural politics are more ambivalent than many of its celebrators might suggest.

Digital Music

Chapter 4 analyzes regional lockout in digital music platforms. This chapter shows that regional lockout in music is a relatively recent phenomenon, having grown out of the record industry’s increasing reliance on digital download stores and streaming platforms at the expense of the region-free compact disc format. The chapter focuses on the case study of Swedish streaming music service Spotify. Built around a brand promoting music “everywhere” and “for everyone,” the platform has instead been central to debates over regional lockout. Spotify and other similar streaming music platforms belie their geoblocked condition by presenting themselves as services offering global, omnipresent, and customizable listening experiences. Chapter 4 argues that streaming music platforms’ promises of easily accessible music, mobility, and cosmopolitan interconnection in part mask their inconsistent global availability and mechanisms of geolocative back-end control. In doing so, they conflate mobility in an individualized, experiential sense with a global erasure of borders.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion begins by assessing “end of geoblocking” discourses, or talk in industry, activist, consumer, and regulatory circles hailing and promoting the death of regional lockout. The conclusion argues that such discourses treat geoblocking as a historical blip—the result of media industries trying to integrate digital technologies into existing distribution practices and intellectual property regimes rather than simply the newest manifestation of long-standing business models based on market segmentation. The conclusion, and the book, end by asserting that media can still encourage forms of cosmopolitanism marked by an appreciation of diversity, empathy with people from across borders and cultures, and shared global cultural citizenship. For researchers and educators, region-free media can foster such attitudes in spaces of media education and literacy.

Video on Demand

Chapter 3 explores how people engage the ideas of geography and belonging within geoblocked online video-on-demand platforms. A form of regional lockout for the internet age, geoblocking is the practice of barring a user from an online platform based on the user’s geographic location. Through illustrative case studies—geoblocking in Australia and New Zealand, the debates over the geoblocked BBC iPlayer platform, and the European Union’s recent attempt to ban geoblocking among its countries’ borders—this chapter argues that geoblocking represents an arena where consumers, industries, and regulators negotiate the realities of national and regional control over digital entertainment platforms versus fantasies of a globally open internet. The chapter shows that consumers’ vocalized frustrations about lack of access as well as industry and regulatory decisions about distribution and technology are based in ideas regarding the economic and cultural value of certain territories. This chapter illustrates how geoblocking structures inequalities in access to cultural resources.

Console Games

Chapter 2 explores the history of regional lockout in console video games. As video games became popular throughout Japan and North America in the 1980s, the industry forged a system of carefully managed adaptation and distribution of games to each market. Game companies introduced region chips and differently shaped cartridges to ensure that consumers were using games on approved devices, and they eventually adopted a region code format similar to the DVD. The industry’s longtime use of regional lockout helped set the contours of global distribution, but it also fomented a network of piracy, game and console hacking, and informal trade among consumers who typify the “hardcore” gamer. Knowing how to navigate and circumvent regional lockout became a marker of participation in hardcore gamer communities. Chapter 2 thus argues that regional lockout did more than simply control global video game distribution paths. It also helped shape the contours of hardcore gamer culture.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the major methods and arguments of the book. In doing so, it emphasizes that regional lockout is at once a system of technological regulation, media distribution, and geocultural discrimination. Situating regional lockout within the history of scholarly analysis of these areas, the introduction illustrates how distribution practices, digital regulation systems, and geocultural difference and inequality all influence one another. In doing so, the introduction also develops a theory of geocultural capital, which refers to a kind of broadly scaled cultural capital applied to places rather than people—that is, a hierarchical perception of a nation or region’s value based on its access to cultural resources like media.