| Region free out of the factory |
The other Michael comments on his new Yamaha DVD player being region free out of the factory. It think most DVD manufacturers faced up to commercial reality here some time ago and have been doing this for a while. I know that my Pioneer DVD player which I bought about six years ago was region free out of the factory, and I wouldn't buy a DVD player which wasn't. [tags: dvd decss region free illegal restraint of trade]
posted at: 17:54 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Michael Carden (not another michael)
Just a brief comment on the history of region coding. Back in about 1996 or so when the 'first tier' Japanese manufacturers of domestic electronics introduced DVD players, we got region coding. Think Panasonic. Think Sony. By an astonishing coincidence, these two companies owned movie distribution companies at the time. MCI and UA if I recall correctly.
The threat that premature DVD releases in foreign markets might make to their profits resulted in a 'gentleman's agreement' between the first tier manufacturers and the various movie distributors to prevent DVDs preceding cinema releases.
Pity no one told the second and third tier manufacturers in China and Korea etc. They had no gentleman's agreements, so they blithely sold their (generally much less expensive) products around the world and caused much gnashing of teeth among the 'big boys.'
I was with Panasonic Auatralia at the time, and our product marketing relied heavily on an ignorant customer base, but guess what? The customers became savvy and started buying the cheaper players with no region coding (or macrovision protection or...) and sales suffered greatly. This resulted in the embarrassing situation where Panasonic's own techies around the world were actively engaged in creating hacks to bypass region coding and make customers happy.
After a couple of years the hacks became doable in software and new players were routinely unpacked, defanged, repacked and sent out to retailers. Now, thankfully, they mostly arrive in Australia region free.
Too bad for the likes of Panasonic and Sony that they let their sales suffer for years before they understood how pointless region coding was.
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Duncan
DVD players aren't really set to region free, they are set to region 0 so in theory they will play a disk from any region. Only problem is that the distibutors know this and are threatining to (and there already are a few) bring out disks that will not play unless the appropriate region is selected. I guess that where software changes come in, so you can select which region you want.
Its not really clever all there doing is incouraging people to buy/acquire pirate copies. Maybe thats why it's not a widespread tactic.