3

Video on Demand

Geoblocking, Borders, and Geocultural Anxieties

In January 2016, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings delivered a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The presentation was, in many ways, standard tech CEO fare: a blazer-and-jeans-clad Hastings expounding on internet TV’s revolution of consumer choice and technological progress. Notable about this particular speech, however, was his assertion of Silicon Valley–based Netflix as a newly global delivery system for that choice and progress. Toward the beginning of the talk, Hastings celebrates Netflix’s international reach as not just good business and proof of the platform’s success, but as something deeper: an emblem of global connectivity. Promising to “put consumers around the world in the driver’s seat” vis-à-vis their viewing, Hastings promotes Netflix as a way of “building connections between cultures and people.”1 These promises of consumer empowerment reverberate from the individual to the global. Not only do consumers around the world get to watch Orange Is the New Black no matter where they are, in so doing they are offered the opportunity to participate in a shared media ritual that extends across continents. At the presentation’s climax, Hastings makes a dramatic announcement in front of a screen adorned with several national flags: “Today, I am delighted to announce that while we have been here on stage at CES, we switched Netflix on in Azerbaijan, in Vietnam, in India, in Nigeria, in Poland, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Singapore, in South Korea, in Turkey, in Indonesia, and in 130 new countries.” The crowd bursts into applause, and Hastings continues, his voice raised: “Today, right now, you are witnessing the birth of a global TV network!” Onscreen, we see a map of the world comprising tiny rectangular video screens and a hashtag: #netflixeverywhere. As Ramon Lobato says, Hastings’s presentation signaled that “Netflix had become a global media company—available almost everywhere, with a potential foothold in almost all the major national markets.”2 The company would no longer be defined in national terms (a series of different Netflixes), but in terms of global ubiquity and unification.

Hastings’s presentation is quite savvy in its spoken and visual rhetoric. The nations he stresses in his announcement are carefully chosen to include a sampling of powerful and growing national media markets, thus implying that the platform will be a major player in both established and burgeoning media economies. At the same time, the flags onscreen collectively signify a holistic sense of globalness. This reminds us of all the places Netflix will now be available while at the same time turning our attention to the world as a broader connected space rather than a series of disconnected territories. In promoting Netflix as a new network, Hastings implies that the same opportunities and products will be available to everyone—viewers across all seven continents (yes, even Antarctica) can all feel like they are experiencing something together. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan’s global village, long promised by digital evangelists and deferred by the disjunctive realities of digital politics and infrastructure, would manifest as collective global binge watching.

The keynote commemorates the supposed end of a specific genre of regional lockout: online video geoblocking. Hastings obliquely references this irritating experience, promising consumers, “No more waiting . . . no more frustration. Just Netflix how, when, and wherever you are in the world.” However, it will likely not come as a surprise to find out that he is overstating things. While the Netflix platform and subscriptions to its streaming services are available around the world, prices and content libraries still differ from place to place.3 Furthermore, despite Hastings’s promises of global access, Netflix is not even available everywhere: North Korea, Syria, and Crimea are barred access due to sanctions. In addition, Hastings’s breathless announcement was undercut slightly by a caveat: “While you have been listening to me talk, the Netflix service has gone live in nearly every country of the world but China, where we hope to also be in the future.” The CES crowd chuckles at this last line, likely familiar with having to navigate that country’s tight restrictions on cultural imports and digital access. Furthermore, as Lobato points out, Netflix’s global expansion has been a bumpy road, rife with protests against explicit content, blocks by local telecoms, and difficulties regarding content quotas.4 While Hastings’s announcement posits a dramatic erasure of online video’s borders, a look across the global digital entertainment landscape reveals a media environment still replete with purposeful disconnection.

Figure 3.1. “A new global TV network,” says Hastings. Screenshot: Netflix, “Netflix CES 2016 Keynote.”

Although Hastings’s presentation is loaded with now-familiar rhetoric of democratized global interconnection—what David Morley and Kevin Robins call the “mythology of global media”—this book has shown that digital borders exist even in an era when the internet shapes more and more of the world’s cultural experiences.5 The CES keynote, intended to be a moment of shared revelry in Netflix’s brand-new global openness, is undercut with reminders of territories still left in the dark. Indeed, regional lockout is still very much in place, showing signs of adaptation to new conditions rather than what many assumed would be its gradual elimination. Regional lockout’s borders are still based on established distribution business models of global geographic market segmentation, and they are put in place through complex alignments among content industries, digital media manufacturers, and industrial consortia. These borders are theoretically good for entertainment industries looking to maximize profits but occasionally a thorn in the side of platform-owners hoping to expand their markets. Just before making this final announcement, Hastings laments the conditions that have slowed Netflix’s global reach, complaining that “content rights are sliced and diced” in ways that make it difficult to offer the same products to everyone. As this suggests, regional lockout also still regularly frustrates consumers.

This chapter moves from the cartridge- and disc-based media explored in the first two chapters and into the more fragmented and less obviously physical realm of online video-on-demand (VOD). For many around the world—though by no means everyone—the distribution of film and television is transitioning to an era of online delivery.6 Viewers increasingly access film and television through online streaming, rental, or electronic sell-through platforms while moving away from DVDs and Blu-ray discs. As online platforms have developed and proliferated, regional lockout practices have shifted from region codes (whether in differently coded DVDs or video game discs) to what is usually referred to as “geoblocking,” or the prohibition of access to an online platform or service based on one’s geographic location. Part of what distinguishes geoblocking in online VOD from the earlier forms of regional lockout explored in the last two chapters is that popular perceptions of the internet as a borderless medium have animated even more intense debate over the appropriateness of regional control. Of course, such utopian ideas have long ignored that the internet offers more opportunities for back-end control, user surveillance, and invisible DRM systems than a DVD or video game cartridge ever did.

This chapter argues that geoblocking in VOD is an arena wherein users, industries, regulators, and intermediaries engage in a tug-of-war between fantasies of a borderless, open internet and the sovereignty of nations and regions. This tug-of-war is characterized by a tension between frustration that borders are still important in a digital age as well as attempts to assert the importance of retaining and protecting these borders. Geoblocking therefore offers a particularly rich illustration of the kind of status via media access that I have been calling geocultural capital. As I will show, various stakeholders who discuss and debate geoblocking use it to fight battles over issues like national identity and economic protectionism. These debates are occasionally more complicated than the commonly assumed idea that media companies would be in favor of geoblocking and consumers against it. For instance, this chapter’s primary case study of the geoblocked BBC iPlayer shows how consumers throughout the world covet access to the UK-only platform and how this brings about feelings of nationalist pride and protection in British viewers who are opposed to unauthorized iPlayer access. This pride expresses itself as geocultural capital, because these British viewers want to assure that the scarce resource of access to the BBC remains available within their borders. This chapter’s case studies focus largely on examples throughout the UK and Europe (with a brief detour back to Oceania), as these are spaces wherein the ongoing tensions among nation, region, and world are particularly acute and easily observed. With that said, the particular dynamics blending national/regional identity, distinction, geopolitics, and questions of access look different depending on context.

From Region Codes to Geoblocking

Although geoblocking is philosophically similar to region codes in its attempts at geographic control, technologically it is quite different. Instead of relying on codes and encryption, geoblocking generally operates through technologies that block users’ access to a platform based on their Internet Protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to each device connected to the internet. Because IP addresses indicate users’ geographic locations, platforms can measure them against databases of IP addresses to determine how to respond. If the IP address indicates that the user is connecting from a country where the platform is allowed, the user gains access; if not, the user is blocked.7 Platforms also use IP address detection to alter prices and libraries based on territory, practices often lumped in with geoblocking as a geographically informed frustration. However, IP detection is not the only method platforms use to block access. Netflix, for instance, requires that users trying to access the United States’ version of the platform not only connect from a US IP address but sign up for the service using an American credit card as well. As a broader phenomenon, geoblocking can manifest through the power of the state (through internet censorship), private media industries (through geoblocking in online video contexts), or somewhere in between.8 While states and international regulators grease the wheels for cultural industries and multinational corporations to perpetuate geoblocking, the industries and corporations are the ones that introduce and monitor geoblocking systems. Digital platform developers, media industries, and intermediaries set the conditions for the kind of geoblocking explored in this book more so than oppressive states do.

As a way of controlling film and television’s distribution windows, geoblocking follows similar industrial logics as DVD region codes. However, it is not precisely a next step in a linear history of regulating digital platforms. While earlier tussles over DVD and video game region codes helped shape subsequent debates surrounding the geoblocking of VOD platforms, the latter is harder to pin down. It does not abide by a single standard like the DVD region code, it shapes media flows across a diverse and constantly changing VOD landscape, and it can be enforced through several different technological mechanisms. Whereas a bit of digging could lead a consumer to learn about the DVD CCA and the reasons a Region One DVD would not play in her Region Two DVD player, geoblocking remains a contingent and often confusing process informed by the practices of individual platforms rather than one transnational body that determines the standards and shape of geoblocking around the world.

On a basic technological level, geoblocking is one example of an ever-increasing number of digital geolocative technologies that use satellites or IP addresses to pinpoint a user’s location. These exist well beyond the realm of entertainment delivery and permeate everyday life for digital media users: cellular phones, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and internet-connected computers are all geolocative. Often, these technologies use geolocation in order to customize the user’s experience on the platform, allowing platform owners and advertisers to collect identifiable information for a variety of reasons. Thus, geoblocking is related to the surveillance and customization systems of major digital platforms. However, while such uses take advantage of a technology’s geolocative properties to the user’s supposed benefit (even if the reality is, at best, far more ambivalent), the firms that own and control VOD or other online platforms use geolocation to prohibit people from using a technology or platform. They do so with IP detection and blocking software developed by a company like Neustar, which licenses its IP Intelligence geolocation program to platforms so that they can comply with content industries’ international licensing deals. Content industries and their intermediaries can thus use digital media’s locative nature to restrict or control the activities of users as much as they can to enrich them.

Despite this, many VOD optimists argued that streaming video would usher in an era of widespread media accessibility. For them, online distribution would enable a greater accessibility of films and television programs around the world.9 These arguments articulate familiar celebrations of the internet as an entertainment cornucopia. As the logic goes, because online media platforms were supposed to have opened up borders, regional lockout should be a relic of an earlier era more reliant on the limitations of analog infrastructures and “physical” media. Examples abound of global op-eds and trade publications characterizing geoblocking as undemocratic and anachronistic. An Australian consumer reports journal protests, “The internet is a borderless world—news, shopping and social interaction with people from all over the world is at our fingertips. But some online retailers haven’t yet embraced this fact.”10 One report about Singaporean streaming services likewise argues, “Geographical restrictions on content distribution have their roots in a business model built long before the Internet and digitization made it possible for content to be distributed around the world at a low incremental cost. And, as with all industries disrupted by technology, the movie and TV industry continues to resist change.”11 A Sydney newspaper suggests that regional lockout should have been consigned to history and compares it to DVD region codes: “Just when you thought geographical restrictions were a thing of the past, along came geoblocking, a kind of regional encoding for the era of digital downloads and streaming.”12 These are just a few representative examples. As such arguments would have it, while the internet inevitably moves society toward a condition based in increased openness and less reliance on geographic boundaries, the business models of film and television production and distribution companies should follow suit and adapt to these new conditions.

Such arguments rely on a couple of assumptions: first, that the internet offers an easier, freer, and more equalizing user experience than discs and cartridges, and second, that new media somehow erase spatial boundaries rather than reinforce or reflect them. Rather, Chuck Tryon posits geoblocking as a material limitation on the sort of mobility and consumer freedom that on-demand platforms promise, pointing to a disconnection between the discourses of ease and fluidity and the often disjunctive reality of the streaming VOD experience.13 As Peter Urquhart and Ira Wagman argue, for instance, confrontations with geoblocked technologies remind Canadians of the “power of place” even while the rhetoric of the borderless web surrounds VOD.14 As they suggest, the ubiquity of geoblocking throughout Canada requires considering the ways global media distribution shapes global culture and complicates the rhetoric of borderlessness. When we move beyond the PR hype of digital media industries, it becomes clear that geoblocking and streaming platforms’ putative flexibility are not countervailing forces but phenomena that operate on the same logic of panoptic customization and control. VOD platforms like Netflix mask their careful control of content availability and the user experience beneath a veneer of improved customization and the promotion of entertainment’s increased convenience and ubiquity. Over time, it has become clear that algorithmic culture and its attendant practices of data tracking and user surveillance are as much about back-end control as they are about consumer flexibility and freedom. Geoblocking must be considered in this broader context, as the geolocative dimensions of algorithmic culture—how recommendations and libraries are based on one’s geographic location—can be wielded in order to keep users out.

These issues are indicative of broader forces of market and infrastructure, but they also bring out more banal feelings of frustration and discrimination. Urquhart and Wagman’s argument gestures at some of geoblocking’s softer, complex, and identity-based dimensions—namely, how regional lockout reminds people of where they stand in global cultural hierarchies. Following this move beyond issues of hard regulatory power and digital utopias and dystopias, we might better understand how geoblocking intersects with geographic and cultural difference, identity, belonging, and status.

Geocultural Capital and Geoblocking in Oceania

To explore these issues, let us return briefly to Australia and New Zealand, where we spent some time in chapter 1 and where concerns of equitable access have been central to digital film distribution.15 The discourses surrounding anti-geoblocking sentiment regularly involve geocultural capital—which territories have more of it than Australia and New Zealand, how to attain it through greater access to cultural resources, and so on. Mark Stewart has argued that New Zealand’s television viewers exist in a “cultural silo” due to a lack of access to television on-demand services and spaces of television talk.16 Furthermore, the idea that Australians are “second-class citizens” in the global media economy is a common theme in complaints about lack of access.17 While the higher prices that Australians in particular pay for digital services (often referred to as the “Australia tax”) suggest that these struggles are in part about economic capital, they also reflect more abstract questions of a territory’s cultural status.18 This comes about in moments when the public as well as policy makers invoke the United States as both the villain (by disallowing access to its platforms and forcing versions of its own intellectual property laws on the rest of the world) and the standard by which Australia’s own consumer-cultural landscape should be shaped.19 Feeling left out of the global mediascape, Australian consumers and politicians alike have a long history of expressing their feelings of exclusion from the higher ranks of the world’s cultural markets.

Debates over geoblocking—as well as discussions about how to get around it—exist among a wide variety of Oceanic players: consumers, consumer rights groups, regulators, and stakeholders in the media and tech industries. As Ramon Lobato and James Meese have shown, geoblocking circumvention is a relatively mainstream practice in Australia.20 It is so mainstream, in fact, that papers like the Sydney Morning Herald have published circumvention instructions and consumer reports on different virtual private network (VPN) and proxy services, which mask a user’s IP address and trick a platform into thinking that she is connecting from an approved country. Even telecommunications companies get involved in circumvention. In 2013, New Zealand ISP CallPlus offered its customers an add-on service called Global Mode, which was essentially a built-in VPN that gave users access to geoblocked platforms.21 This would allow users to connect to geoblocked VOD platforms like Netflix and the BBC iPlayer, effectively sanctioning geoblocking circumvention at the service-provider level.22 Global Mode no longer exists in New Zealand, as CallPlus and Bypass Network Services, the developer of Global Mode, settled with a number of media corporations (including Sky TV) who had sued to stop ISPs from offering the service.23 Still, during its brief lifetime, Global Mode’s promotional rhetoric was redolent with suggestions of unequally distributed geocultural capital: “We don’t want your guests being treated like second-class citizens just because they are staying in New Zealand. Instead, we want them to have the same rich online experiences as they do in their own country.”24 The use of terms like “second-class” and “rich” to describe differential access to entertainment and media is not simply a melodramatic analogy; rather, it shows that people think of media accessibility as related to capital and status.

At the same time, geoblocking debates in the region are not merely altruistic paeans for equality. Just as often, politicians use geoblocking to foment nationalist sentiment and push for free-market trade regulation and deregulation.25 In July 2013, an Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications published a report on IT pricing, in particular tackling online price-discrimination practices for which geoblocking sets the technological conditions. They called for the end of geoblocking, referring to it as “a significant constraint on consumer choice.”26 Much of the committee criticized the fact that Australians often had to pay higher prices for entertainment and computing technology because of territorial markets. As committee chair Nick Champion suggested, Australian consumers were “clearly perplexed, frustrated, and angered by the experience of paying higher prices for IT products than consumers in comparable countries.”27 The government’s condemnation of geoblocking offered a rather strong rebuke of the world’s most powerful intellectual property regulators, but it also represented an argument for the equitable treatment of global territories (or at least Australia) by major media corporations. Champion’s invocation of “comparable countries” is, itself, a plea resting on the premise that the world is divided into unequal, hierarchically organized territories and that Australia belongs higher up in the hierarchy. Through geoblocking, issues regarding market power, cultural access, national identity, and feelings of inadequacy all swirl together.

This becomes clear in the debates that have circulated around Netflix in particular, which was finally introduced to Australia in 2015—albeit with a smaller library that still inspired viewers to seek out the larger American version. In April 2013, the Australian consumer reports publication Choice prepared a report on why Netflix was not available in the country and attempted to contact the company in order to get answers. This was motivated by the upcoming Netflix-exclusive release of the fourth season of the American cult comedy favorite Arrested Development, which Australian Netflix users would not be able to access.28 After receiving no response from the company, Choice published a copy of their letter to Netflix on its Facebook page. Noting that since the first three seasons of Arrested Development had already aired in Australia and thus had a significant fan base in that country, Choice’s letter asked the following questions:

Such questions indicate that this is not a mere issue of access to a television text but is also about access to a similar viewing experience. As the argument goes, not only should Australian viewers be able to see this season of Arrested Development at some point, they should be able to watch it and potentially binge it at the same time as North American viewers.

On one level, these issues are banal. Questions of whether viewers get to watch Arrested Development in the same way pale in comparison to more obviously important concerns over international trade and intellectual property regulation in both the private and public spheres, not to mention more urgent matters like unequal access to food or potable water. However, as the publication argues in a subsequent post, the letter is about more than just Arrested Development: “Choice isn’t campaigning for an Australia with Netflix; we are campaigning for an Australia where consumers can access the content they want, the way that they want, at a price that is fair and reasonable, without resorting to criminal activity.”30 Such statements invoke issues that extend well beyond the simple question of what to watch on a lazy Sunday. Geoblocking provides a gateway to broader questions regarding the role of both private and state organizations in shaping how we use digital technologies, how we understand our own agency in relation to our devices, and how these issues tie to our ability to participate on a more-or-less equal playing field in the digital mediascape.

National Culture and Circumvention: The BBC iPlayer

Because geoblocking and geocultural capital are wedded to place and access, they often articulate expressions of national identity. These may not always take the same shape—consider the distinctions among politicians’ free-market nationalism and consumers’ more personalized expressions of national discrimination. Either way, geoblocking (and regional lockout more broadly) enacts its “boundary work” both by tracing literal geographic borders and by sustaining lines of difference and inequality among media viewers living in different countries.31 Users might consider access to be a barometer of cultural power and status attained via geocultural capital. The knowledge that a certain platform is available in one area but unavailable in another can engender feelings of inclusion, exclusion, pride, and envy. Take the BBC’s iPlayer platform, for example. As a national public broadcasting system that carries programs with global appeal, the geoblocked iPlayer illustrates familiar tensions between television as a national form and transnational digital media distribution. While on the one hand national broadcasting institutions experiment with multi-platform engagement, global digital presences, and the fragmentation putatively wrought by media globalization and on-demand platforms, on the other, users, industries, and states often still imagine public broadcasting’s audience in terms of a nationally defined public.32 The iPlayer thus exemplifies how broadcasting as a spatially limited technology conflicts with commonly held notions of the internet as a fundamentally global medium.

These tensions bring out arguments for and against geoblocking that rest on differences in geocultural capital. Here, the nationally geoblocked status of the iPlayer becomes a flashpoint for debates over BBC access—who should have it, who should not, and how access is a resource that marks national distinction. British viewers have a significant investment in the BBC—literally, through the license fee they pay, and figuratively, as a political and emotional emblem of national identity. When consumers from outside the UK use VPNs in order to access the geoblocked platform, this raises ire among consumers and industry types alike. iPlayer access is a cultural resource that many aim to keep scarce, which assures that the UK maintains the geocultural capital that comes with full access to a premier broadcasting institution. It makes sense that the BBC, whose operations depend in part on controlling viewer numbers and meting out access to the platform, would want to geoblock the iPlayer. Still, that viewers might want the platform to remain geoblocked seems counterintuitive. Because many public discussions about geoblocking reflect the idea that we all want and expect equal access to platforms in a streaming era, it would be easy to assume that the battles break down with consumers on the anti-geoblocking side and media industries on the pro-geoblocking side. However, this would ignore how issues of international distinction and geocultural capital complicate these debates. For some British users, the status that comes with national ownership of the BBC outweighs any benefits of opening it up to the rest of the world.

The BBC iPlayer is a streaming and download platform providing television and radio programs from the Corporation’s various channels. The platform’s television programming is geoblocked outside the UK, the logic being that citizens who pay the nation’s television license fee, which funds the BBC, should have access to both the platform’s livestreamed and on-demand programming. While anyone connecting from within the nation’s borders can access the on-demand service, one needs a TV license to access the iPlayer’s livestreaming capabilities. Although one might assume that the BBC is solely responsible for ensuring that the platform remains geoblocked, the reality is more complicated. BBC Worldwide, the commercial, international distribution wing of the Corporation, has paid lip service to extending the iPlayer’s access abroad. In 2011, the iPlayer expanded onto a limited subscription and ad-supported mobile app version called Global iPlayer, which was made available in several European countries, Canada, and Australia before shuttering in 2015.33 Soon after the Global iPlayer’s launch, the BBC announced that the platform would be made available in the United States, but that was put on hold after threats from cable companies that were worried the iPlayer would carry shows already aired by the US cable network BBC America.34 Thus, the tussles over the iPlayer’s access in the United States remains a point of contention between the two nations’ media systems, with the US media industries ensuring that the British app remains blocked.

One outcome of television’s convergence with the internet is the rise of proprietary curatorial platforms—what Amanda Lotz calls “portals”—each of which operate under different, constantly changing sets of licensing agreements with content companies.35 Portals like the iPlayer (and Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and the host of others that deliver movies and TV programs to viewers around the world) operate separately from one another as business entities, brands, and spaces of user experience. The platform is important both as an industrial and technological system that delivers media to us and as a set of discourses about what those systems can offer us.36 The iPlayer in particular is redolent with meanings of Britishness and British identity due to its geographically limited remediation of British state media. Even in an era of media globalization, the presentation of media through a national frame still carries a great deal of purchase. Nationally scaled media industries assert ideological and cultural power at the level of subjectivity and identity. By generating “affective proximity across disperse locations,” to use Nitin Govil’s words, media help produce an idea of nationhood in which the audience invests.37 In the British context, Stuart Hall argued that the BBC was “a ‘machine’ through which the nation was constituted. It produced the nation which it addressed; it constituted its audience by the ways in which it represented them.”38 Thus, while on the one hand the iPlayer’s practice of locking out non-UK users is just one of many geographical constraints placed on the internet’s architecture, on the other hand it extends the BBC’s role in addressing and constructing a distinctly British audience. The iPlayer thus remediates the goals of public service that have informed the BBC since its founding. Indeed, one group of scholars argues that the BBC as a multi-platform project presents opportunities for different, potentially richer media experiences while maintaining and extending the Corporation’s public service compact.39 Of course, this compact generally articulates to a sense of British nationality and even nationalism, both in its industrial ontology as a national public broadcaster and the emotional and political relationship that viewers might have with the network.

At the same time, BBC television programming has long had appeal well beyond the UK’s borders, in part due to the network’s history of exporting programs and developing international networks.40 British television is valuable abroad—not just in economic terms, but also in how people appreciate it as a harder-to-access commodity that aligns with particular cult and sophisticated tastes. Given this, it made sense that fans would try to view episodes before they were available in the United States. Unauthorized attempts to access the iPlayer also become particularly widespread during major global sporting events like the Olympic Games or the World Cup.41 Viewers discontent with local time-shifting of the Olympics or the quality of home broadcasts look for ways to access the BBC’s coverage, which are relatively easy to find. A 2010 article on the tech blog Lifehacker (one of many such posts on this site and others) instructs users on how to connect to the iPlayer via proxy or VPN. The impetus for this particular Lifehacker piece is the gap between Doctor Who’s British airdate and its broadcast on BBC America two weeks later, though similar articles abound that highlight a jones for Olympic gymnastics or Premier League football. Indicating that regional lockout is as much about time as it is about space, this particular article shows Doctor Who fans in the United States how they might access the iPlayer in order to maintain the same temporal relationship to the program as their British counterparts. This becomes crystal clear in the comment threads, as one American commenter notes, “We don’t want to have to wait two weeks (for BBC America) or six months to a year (Netflix) for the show to actually become available for us to watch . . . And unfortunately, the only way for us to watch it in a timely fashion is to do so illegally.”42 Articles like this, and many comments in response, reject the bordered logics that keep the global VOD environment segmented along national lines. In doing so, they treat the iPlayer like a platform violating the internet’s ideally global state rather than an online manifestation of a national broadcaster.

Of course, not everyone feels the same way. Some British users have made it clear that they are less than thrilled with the fact that audience members in the States are looking to access BBC material for free. Often, they express this irritation in the comment sections of articles and blog posts that promote circumvention via VPNs. And while comment sections may not seem like the ideal place to find arguments built around complex, intertwined dynamics of national identity, cultural policy, and digital regulation, many of their points show how some British citizens associate the BBC with a sense of national pride and ownership. For them, opening up access dilutes the BBC’s national character. Commenters make statements such as “If you’re not paying the UK license fee you’re stealing from me and all others who do fork out $228 a year for the service . . . All things considered, this is clearly a way to rip off honest license payers in the UK.”43 In the aforementioned Lifehacker article, one commenter complains, “I don’t like this. Why? Because I (along with everyone else in the UK) PAY £145 a year to watch TV INCLUDING iPlayer. It’s not cool, you’re basically stealing our great television that we pay for. That’s why British TV is the best, WE PAY FOR IT. So this is annoying.”44 These viewers are not simply angry about theft. They also associate the national, publicly funded model of the BBC with the quality of the programming. As the logic goes, if freeloaders access the platform and that association degrades, the BBC will be no better than other, lesser forms of popular media. Another reacts similarly: “Great. So just as the BBC is being forced to cut services we now have even more of those who don’t pay the license fee ($213 a year!) watching the shows for nothing! If you want the benefits of a ‘socialist’ system then you’ll have to pay for it!”45 Yet another commenter uses the piece to assert support for the publicly funded BBC against transnational, private corporations: “Doing this harms the BBC and threatens future access to content, there are already very powerful media figures (Rupert Murdoch and his Sky network) working very hard to take down the BBC—this isn’t helping.”46 Again, the national character of public media contrasts with the transnational character of corporate, private media conglomerates. Others suggest that they plan to send the article to the BBC, with the presumed goal of encouraging some form of disciplinary or legal action against Lifehacker.

The ongoing relationships between the BBC and British identity, as well as the ways people negotiate such issues when television goes global, reveal a particular international dynamic at play in these threads. For one, the threads are populated by many American commenters. Perhaps used to the relative wealth of media access associated with the United States’ generally high levels of geocultural capital, these consumers argue for various reasons that they should have access to the platform.47 Occasionally, such users suggest that they would happily pay the BBC license fee for access to the iPlayer, enacting a consumer logic whereby the license fee functions as the price of a globally distributed product rather than a national tax. The distinctly national dimensions of the iPlayer are more apparent in the discourse of British commenters, who express pride and protectiveness through the iPlayer and its license fee. This manifests in part as pushback against the kind of American privilege that suggests US viewers necessarily deserve access to the platform. For these British viewers, the license fee is not simply the pay-to-play price for the iPlayer—it is a contribution that helps ensure the higher quality of the BBC’s programming and the obligation of a good viewing citizen who recognizes the Corporation as a public utility.48 Even as the BBC’s professed goals of global expansion and individualized, customizable programming seemed to undercut its national associations somewhat in the mid-2010s, the trend has moved back toward making the iPlayer available only to tax-paying Britons. As mentioned above, the Global iPlayer is no more, and in 2016 the BBC began requiring that all iPlayer users must pay the license fee in order to watch live and on-demand programming. This not only curbs free viewing by those living in the UK, it also makes it harder for non-British viewers to access the platform through VPNs.49 While pro-circumvention publications and consumers argue their case through the logics of internet freedom or consumer economics, British viewers argue that the iPlayer’s geoblock is steeped in the BBC’s fundamentally national identity. In doing so, they maintain a kind of ownership over the platform. In a 2013 statement, BBC director-general Tony Hall made clear the relationship between this sense of national ownership and “proper” access to the network: “We should be treating [viewers] like owners, not just as license fee payers. People should not be saying ‘the BBC,’ but ‘my BBC,’ ‘our BBC.’”50

Thus, the iPlayer is not simply another way of delivering radio and TV programs. It remediates the national, and nationalist, associations between the BBC and the UK. A view of geoblocking as simply the oppressive, top-down practice of shadowy oligopolies ignores moments when users unexpectedly promote geoblocking—in this case, by drawing on ideas regarding the BBC as something special to British viewers. Broadly, such arguments are steeped in questions about what television is worth in a digital age, when access is increasingly unmoored from perceived obligations of payment.51 More specifically, the iPlayer represents to many British viewers the ability to access a precious cultural resource—one that lends the UK rare stores of geocultural capital. Those who hold the platform dear perceive “stolen” access to it as a way that another region (in this case, the United States) attains unearned geocultural capital. By this logic, unauthorized access not only reinforces US viewers’ relative privilege in the global mediascape, it also dilutes the UK’s geocultural capital by making a particular cultural resource less scarce. Such an example shows that users’ feelings are more complicated than the simple assumption that they would and should be opposed to geoblocking. Rather, the alignments between regional lockout and geocultural privilege can bring about complex blends of feelings related to competitiveness and superiority. As a Wired article about the launch of Global iPlayer in Europe puts it, the platform “fills the gap for smug Europeans left by Spotify launching in the U.S.”52 While the comment is of course a joke, it speaks to the capital that comes with owning something exclusive. Further complicating our assumptions about geoblocking’s global effects, the iPlayer indicates how a nation or region’s geocultural capital does not always follow a preestablished global hierarchy of economic or state power. If the iPlayer is the cultural resource so highly coveted, then the UK has a greater amount of geocultural capital than does the United States in this instance. Such complicated dynamics of power, status, and difference become apparent when governing bodies attempt to ban geoblocking. The difficulty in doing so speaks to the influence of the various stakeholders involved.

A Digital Single Market?

By arguing that the iPlayer should remain geoblocked, industry players and viewers in the UK sought to protect British culture, identity, and economy from encroaching hordes of nonpaying viewers. Across the sea, the European Commission would soon propose an alternate path, one marked by the easing of digital borders. It would do so through the initiative I discussed at the beginning of this book: the Digital Single Market (DSM). After a years-long debate, the Commission approved the DSM in 2015. Encompassing a broad set of transnational copyright and trade proposals, the initiative seeks to combine the EU’s countries into one larger market to ease cross-border digital trade, end price discrimination for digital products, and curb geoblocking among member states. As part of a broader push to ban geoblocking among EU countries, the DSM sought to open up iPlayer access across Europe. The BBC was initially noncommittal, suggesting in 2015 that it would “look at the technical and legislative implications” of making the platform available throughout the EU, but this raised the question of who would be in charge of such issues: the platform or the legislative bodies that govern where the platform had a presence.53 As it turned out, the split between UK sovereignty and EU governance represented in 2016’s Brexit vote had an analogue in the question of iPlayer access. Indeed, the UK’s impending exit from the EU—and, as a result, the Digital Single Market—meant that any anti-geoblocking measure put in place by the latter would not apply to British viewers.54

Even still, the EU has promoted the DSM as a potentially barrier-breaking approach to cross-border digital trade over the past several years, although the process of implementing it has often been fraught. During a May 2015 press conference, European Commission vice president Andrus Ansip promoted the DSM’s goals of improving “price transparency” and “tackl[ing] unjustified geoblocking.”55 The Commission defines unjustified geoblocking as “discrimination between E.U. customers based on the desire to segment markets along national borders, in order to increase profits to the detriment of foreign customers.”56 Although the initiative stretches well beyond video-on-demand, VOD services were initially significant targets of the geoblocking ban. Indeed, the DSM is only the latest instance of the Union’s ongoing attempts to restrict regional lockout among European territories. In 2001, it opened an antitrust investigation into DVD region codes, threatening a possible penalty of 10 percent on all disc revenue if Hollywood studios were found guilty of price-fixing.57 Ultimately, this investigation went nowhere, with the EU report concluding, “There has been a convergence in prices between these two regions and the Commission therefore decided not to actively pursue this case any further.”58 Since then, price discrimination and regional lockout have remained significant issues within the European mediascape, and the DSM is the highest-profile attempt thus far to do away with them.

Much of the pro-DSM rhetoric reflects by-now familiar assumptions about how digital media should work—assumptions routinely upended during moments of disconnection or inaccessibility. Similar to many other arguments against geoblocking, pro-DSM forces often argued that regional lockout violated the internet’s fundamentally and ideally open condition. Take these words from a Commission website: “It’s time to make the EU’s single market fit for the digital age—tearing down regulatory walls and moving from 28 national markets to a single one.”59 The commission’s rhetoric presents the geoblocked internet as incongruous with the putatively borderless digital age. Indicating both the proposal’s alignment with traditional tech dogma as well as its attempts to boost the EU as a powerful digital market, many in Silicon Valley celebrated the potential for opening the EU digital borders. In 2014, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote a World Economic Forum editorial titled “Why Europe Needs a Digital Single Market.” Schmidt argues in favor of open digital borders, drawing on the now-common Silicon Valley–espoused blend of utopian digital freedom and free-market capitalism.60

Indeed, boiling the issue down to a clash between open internet activists versus copyright-obsessed corporations ignores the degree to which the DSM is as much about liberal capitalism as it is about digital freedom—if not more so. While all sides invoked the potential losses for consumers regardless of how the regulation turned out, the DSM debate amounted to a battle among different sectors of the media and entertainment industries. Attitudes like Schmidt’s clashed, as they often do, with the goals of global and local media distributors invested in maintaining territorial distribution routes. Trade publications representing the entertainment industries, such as the Hollywood Reporter, often framed the issue through the perspectives of studio executives, film distributors, and theatrical exhibitors. Such pieces leaned heavily on quoted fears that the proposal would “kill European audiovisual culture and diversity” and represent the “death knell” of independent film due to the elimination of territorial exclusivity, which indie studios draw on for financing.61 Ironically, given geoblocking’s long-standing association with Hollywood, such warnings pointed to the possibility that a single EU market could result in the major Hollywood studios dominating that market while European and indie studios get squeezed out. Of course, given that “independent” in these stories referred to Hollywood-indie studios like Lionsgate (which produced the global hit The Hunger Games and sold its European rights by territory), this argument comes across as rather disingenuous.

The influence of private media industries initially resulted in a more compromised agenda as the EU announced in 2016 that “copyrighted audiovisual content” would be exempt from the DSM’s anti-geoblocking rules.62 While the EU aimed to break down digital borders for all entertainment throughout Europe, it seemed that territorial television and film distribution licenses would continue to shape the libraries of VOD platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Later on, however, EU negotiators agreed on a version of the anti-geoblocking rules that would allow users access to their home country’s version of the platform while traveling elsewhere in the EU. The DSM’s “portability regulation” aimed to curtail a particular kind of frustration: a business or vacation traveler discovering that she is blocked from her Netflix account. The result is thus more of a softening of geoblocking rather than an outright ban. By still ensuring that consumers had to keep an account based in their home countries, the proposal exposes the continued importance of the nation while at the same time speaking to the desire for media experiences that fit into a world marked by easier transnational travel and interconnection (for some of us, at least).

As cultural policy, the DSM privileges the EU’s broader regional borders over the national media markets within it, while at the same time drawing new borders around media experience. In doing so, it implies that regional lockout has since become even more fragmented than it was in the days of DVD region codes, which placed most of the continent within Region Two. In a 2007 piece cheekily titled “Notes from Region 2,” Rob Stone wrote of the “lofty ideal of European cinema as a borderless network of film-makers in which countless individuals make decisions that energize a borderless market.”63 Writing even earlier, David Morley captured some implications of such a move: “We have seen a concerted attempt by the European Union to construct the equivalent of a transnational EuroCulture, enshrined in concepts and cultural institutions such as the European Audiovisual Sphere, based on a geographically expanded version of the conventional model of national broadcasting. These cultural strategies have been intended to create a synthetic pan-European identity which will transcend the narrow limits of national particularisms.”64 Years later, the DSM is applying this logic to a broader audiovisual sphere. Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding the DSM presents it as one step toward smoothing what William Uricchio has referred to as the “tangible fault lines, fissures, and ruptures” that have characterized collective European life and identity.65 At the same time, the regulation represents cosmopolitan, liberal capitalism wrapped in the rhetorical packaging of equitable human treatment. It is the Digital Single Market and not the Digital Single Territory or something similar, because its top priority is to smooth the flow of capital across borders.

These tussles between exclusive national borders and open, cross-border movement felt remarkably of the moment in the latter half of the 2010s. Without equating the frustration of a geoblocked Netflix with more urgent matters like refugee crises and violent nationalism, the Digital Single Market issue is nevertheless part of a broader cluster of policy debates over the primacy of national gatekeeping versus a freer flow and intermingling of culture. While the EU and tech companies consider such issues through a blend of cosmopolitan liberalism and free-market capitalism, for many users the issue is much simpler: geoblocking is frustrating because it represents an intrusion of materiality on media texts and experiences that we often think of as somewhat divorced from the material world. However, decades of evidence have shown us that the digital world will not escape the real world’s cultural and geographic clashes. The next chapter explores these issues in the context of digital music—a media practice that seems even less material than VOD given its close association with mobile technologies and its related lack of an obvious visual element that keeps us tied to our screens.