Dear Media Publishers, stop making it so damn hard to give you some of my hard earned money…
HBO recently announced that it would stop its paid TV and streaming service offerings in the Netherlands. This leaves Dutch people like myself with one of 3 choices to keep up with shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld:
- Download it “for free”. 🏴☠️
- Buy the digital episodes from sites like Amazon.
- Buy the show on disc (usually much later after initial broadcasting/streaming unfortunately).
As tempting as option 1 may be, it was declared illegal recently in the Netherlands in order to conform to EU mandate. Legal discussions aside, I actually like to support good quality content creators by paying them for their talents and efforts. I guess that only leaves option 2 and 3 for law abiding citizens such as myself. Or does it?
Let’s explore option 2 a bit. As you may already be aware of, companies like Amazon sell or rent out digital episodes of TV shows like Game of Thrones on their site. Sadly, not all localized versions of Amazon allow for this. More specifically, Amazon.nl only seems to be in the business of selling e-books, whereas Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de seem to run the whole gamut in terms of product and service offerings.
Now, I can already hear you thinking; “can’t you just use one of those sites instead as an EU citizen?”
When it comes to buying goods, definitely. When it comes to buying digital media like TV-shows however, your money suddenly seems to be of no value anymore. More specifically, if you’re trying to purchase an episode of Game of Thrones or any other TV-show/movie as a Dutch citizen on Amazon.de or Amazon.co.uk, you will be greeted with an error dialog stating that you must own a creditcard issued by the country of the Amazon site you’re visiting!
That is, if you want to buy a movie or episode from Amazon.de, you apparently need to own a creditcard that was issued from Germany, or one from the UK if you were planning to buy it from Amazon.co.uk. For some apparent reason, this type of ‘discrimination’ only occurs when purchasing digital media.
In Amazon’s defence, that’s probably not entirely their fault. It probably has to do with localized licensing models publishers maintain which is yet another reason why I think media publishers need to take a good long look in the mirror before crying about piracy: you are literally making it impossible for me to digitally purchase an episode as a Dutch law-abiding citizen right now. Think about that for a minute as we strike out option 2 from our list.
So that only really leaves option 3: buying the episodes on disc instead. Not only do I now have to wait a significant amount of time after the show was broadcast to have it on disc, the fact that the content is now on disc limits the ways I can consume it.
My laptop and tablet for example don’t come with a Blu-Ray disc reader, and I don’t believe that’s going to change anytime soon in an age where streaming is becoming more and more prevalent. In other words, you basically forced me to buy a dying medium that will undoubtedly be a nice paperweight not too long from now… Especially considering people like me only watch movies and TV shows once.
Despite all these disadvantages, I really wanted to catch up on Game of Thrones. It’s a show I loved watching back in 2011, but had to skip out on at some point due to lack of time. Seeing as all my US friends were talking about how good the show was, I eventually relented and bought the season 1–6 blu ray boxset a few days ago.
As I was preparing for a binge watch session, I noticed just how many discs were involved for just 1 season, sometimes even up to 5 discs! The peculiar part of this was that the discs didn’t seem to be filled up efficiently.
Where some discs contained 3 episodes, others only contained 1 or 2 — seemingly at random. The following should give you an idea of how season 1’s episodes were distributed among the 5 discs:
- Episode 1 & 2 (Bonus)
- Episode 3, 4 & 5 (Bonus)
- Episode 6 (Bonus)
- Episode 7, 8 & 9 (Bonus)
- Episode 10 (Bonus)
Now, maybe it’s just me, but why not just fit 3 per discs to begin with? That’d bring down the material costs involved for 1 season back to 4 discs from 5. A 20% savings!
At first I thought it was maybe because of the bonus content potentially being variable in length, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the reason after watching said content. Instead, maybe this was done deliberately in an attempt to sway the buyer into better justifying what they paid for: more discs justifies a higher pricing right? If this is indeed the case, then that’s just wasteful and annoying in my opinion.
That in itself however, is not even the worst part. No, the worst part is the unskippable scenes warning me about piracy. It’s thankfully not filled with cringe rhetoric as “would you download a car?”, but comes pretty close in terms of user experience seeing as I just bought a license to your content. Why are you warning and punishing me with these unskippable scenes when I did exactly what you publishers wanted me to do?
You’re literally preaching to the converted right now…
Seriously though, what were they thinking? Do they really think that pirates are going to leave those unskippable warning screens in there when they pirate the content? No, and I’m actually starting to believe that it’s one of the main reasons why people are pirating content to begin with!
Media Publishers, stop making it so damn hard to give you some of my hard earned money…
TL;DR: Fix your shit media publishers. You’re literally preaching to the converted when you’re warning about piracy with unskippable scenes when I just bought your disc. You also seem to be taking every measure to prevent me from paying you for your digital content, which in itself makes it incredibly enticing to pirate it instead. Take a page basically from Steve Jobs lessons when launching iTunes. People aren’t opposed to paying for content: you just need to make it as convenient as possible for them.
