Ideas

pan-European VOD - problem for film financing and distributors

  • Jan Naszewski profile
    Jan Naszewski
    26 February 2015 - updated 4 years ago
  • 2 comments
    Total votes: 0

Experience:

European films want to be market-relevant and co-financed by the participants of the market, not just state and European subsidies. Do I understand correctly that the EP and EC plan to get rid of geo-blocking of the national VOD rights as part of establishing the single digital market? If that happens, distributors will pay less for the rights as they will have less opportunities to recoup their investment – producers need that money to finance new films, especially smaller, more demanding titles.

Ideas:

VOD can only work if users are willing to pay for it - the revenue streams from that are too small.

Tags: 
geo-blocking

Comments

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Adam WATSON BROWN's picture
Adam WATSON BROWN,
17/03/2015 13:35

Geo-blocking is the subject of much discussion. VP Anders Ansip regretted in his speech at the Digital4EU event that he isn't able to view movies from back home in Estonia because of geo-blocking. Some stakeholders may be calling for the outlawing of geo-blocking across the EU. The problem with geo-blocking is that the internet makes it much easier for people to see what's available in neighbouring Member States. They then get irritated when they can't access the content. And they may seek to satisfy their desire by torrenting what they can't get hold of by normal means

(For those unfamiliar with geo-blocking, it 's a way of limiting access by IP address which are allocated by country. Film rights are sold on a country-by-country basis. Buying the rights for the whole of the EU would be expensive. This leads to geo-blocking of video on demand services.)

I think that we'd like to have our cake and eat it: less ego-blocking and contininge to have a vibrant European film industry.

Total votes: 0
Erik Lambert's picture
Erik Lambert,
06/05/2015 21:25

Though ego-blocking might be helpful in the cinema and television world, if one is to believe the Sonyleaks emails.

Total votes: 0