A friend e-mailed me from London yesterday alerting me to the existence of The West Wing on DVD. All 22 episodes of Season 1 area available on a set of Region 2 discs, which of course are intended to play only on units in Europe, the Middle East and Japan.

It was the first I knew that the Wing was available on DVD, but I’ve long been aware that Europe is the place to go for American television on disc. For further examples, see Friends (US: through Season 2; UK: through Season 8), Ally McBeal (US: Season 1; UK: through Season 4), and South Park (US: Season 1; UK: through Season 4).

Now it does make a certain amount of sense that these shows would be more widely available in the countries that they’re not (prominently) shown on TV. While Friends is syndicated to the United Kingdom, the re-runs clearly don’t have the same value as they do here.

The nefarious part is when the studios try to maintain fat profit margins through artifical barriers erected to prevent interested customers from buying the discs. Region coding is an obvious example of this trend, but it’s only the most recent one. The technical differences amongst television standards in the U.S. (NTSC), most of Europe (PAL), and France (SECAM), is also something that was pushed for by “content providers” to make it much more difficult for an American to buy and play tapes from another country. With the advent of HDTV, the cycle is repeating itself.

I can (and do) bypass the region coding/television standard difficulties by using a DVD-ROM with modified firmware. Here again the entertainment industry pushed for draconian measures, advocating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent anyone from thinking that one can use purchased items in any manner (s)he sees fit.

Somebody needs to stop ’em.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 29th, 2002 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.