1 BEUC, “Imagine This Happening to You.”
2 European Commission, “Digital Single Market.”
3 Jeffrey Himpele has shown how this happens in his study of film exhibition in La Paz, Bolivia, concluding that “the location of cinemas, the genre of films they show, their price and the timing (or delay) of their debuts correspond and separate social and cultural differences among film and video audiences.” Tessa Dwyer and Ioana Uricaru point out that in communist Romania, “access to VCRs or VHS tapes became a status symbol that could translate directly into either economic or social power.” See Himpele, “Film Distribution as Media,” 53; Dwyer and Uricaru, “Slashings and Subtitles,” 48.
4 I draw on Raymond Williams’s definition of incorporation as a process where emergent and potentially threatening cultural practices are eventually subsumed into dominant social and economic orders. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126.
5 Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs, 177.
6 Lessig, Code Version 2.0, 5.
7 Gillespie, Wired Shut, 226.
8 Livingstone and Das, “End of Audiences?” 110. See also Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.”
9 Gillespie, Wired Shut, 101–2.
10 As a result, global internet filtering and censorship like the kinds analyzed by the OpenNet Initiative are related but tangential to the focus of this project. For one, they focus primarily on state-based internet filtering, surveillance, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, whereas my own study investigates forms of regulation developed by transnational entertainment industries (though certainly with the help of governmental regulation). In addition, they train their attention on the internet specifically, whereas my study represents a broader historical analysis of various forms of digital control dating back to the media industries’ transitions to digital delivery technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. See Deibert et al., Access Denied; Deibert et al., Access Controlled; Deibert et al., Access Contested.
11 Consider this oft-cited passage from political economist Nicholas Garnham: “It is cultural distribution, not cultural production, that is the key locus of power and profit.” Garnham, Capitalism and Communication, 162. See also Wasko, How Hollywood Works, 59.
12 In this way, they are similar to the undersea internet cables Nicole Starosielski has written about. See Starosielski, Undersea Network.
13 Iordanova, “Digital Disruption,” 23.
14 Tsing, Friction, 6. This also requires thinking about frictions and disjunctures in media access and availability. In the realm of digital media studies, Elizabeth Ellcessor has argued that some of the more celebratory strains of media scholarship “take access for granted,” basing concepts like use, collaboration, and participatory culture on the premise that one has access to a technology or technological practice in the first place. And while she is writing primarily about digital media access for people with disabilities, we might think about how these concerns can be adapted to questions of access based on geographic location. See Ellcessor, Restricted Access, 5.
15 Havens, Black Television Travels, 2.
16 Couldry, Place of Media Power, 16.
17 By the term “geocultural,” I refer to the ways geography and cultural identity are interlinked in definitions of self and community, particularly in a globalized media landscape. Although I use the word somewhat differently, here, I take inspiration from scholars of global media like Jean Chalaby and Joseph Straubhaar, who write about the importance of geocultural regions in global media markets. Like their uses, mine reflects how the geographical and the cultural are intertwined in the meanings and definitions of places. See Straubhaar, World Television; Chalaby, “Towards an Understanding of Media Transnationalism.”
18 Sterne, “MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” 826. See also the work of John Fiske, who reminds us that “all commodities have cultural as well as functional values.” Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 27.
19 This “circuit of culture” model is proposed and explored in depth in Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies. The authors build on an earlier circuit model proposed in Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” See also a development of the model to the concerns of media studies in D’Acci, “Cultural Studies, Television Studies.”
20 Bielby and Harrington, Global TV, 145–47.
21 As a result, the book also heeds Alisa Perren’s recent call to “attend to the cultural” in studying media distribution. See Perren, “Rethinking Distribution,” 170–71.
22 I use Timothy Havens’s concept of industry lore, which refers to “institutionalized discourses” and conventional wisdom within media industries. In the context of global television distribution, Havens says that industry lore “is a way of talking and thinking about audiences and programming that permits television insiders to imagine connections between audience members and television programming from around the world.” See Havens, Black Television Travels, 4.
23 Reda, “I Hate Geoblocking!”
24 Warner, “Is Netflix Chill?”
25 Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital”; Bourdieu, Distinction. Recently, a group of scholars writing about Bourdieu provided a clear definition of cultural capital: “The advantage derived from the possession of specific kinds of cultural resource.” Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction, 3. Scholars like John Fiske and Henry Jenkins have long considered media a kind of cultural resource. See Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 28; Jenkins, “Why Fiske Still Matters,” xxvi.
26 As a theory that describes how we see places themselves as embodying capital, the concept of geocultural capital is inspired by Tim Cresswell’s argument that place is a means by which we make classifications and draw borders of difference. See Cresswell, In Place / Out of Place, 152–55.
27 Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 245. In the context of the accessibility and distribution of information, Nigel Thrift has shown that literature and media access over the last several centuries contributed to an uneven distribution of knowledge. See Thrift, Spatial Formations, 108.
28 Vincent Pouliot and Frédéric Mérand describe something akin to geocultural capital in their application of Bourdieu to international relations, arguing that the world is shaped by a “hierarchy of states, whereby some have much greater stocks of economic capital, others military capital, and others cultural capital (akin to what we sometimes call ‘soft power’).” However, “soft power” is still somewhat imprecise as a way to define cultural capital (and, by extension, geocultural capital), as it incorporates Bourdieuian concepts of social and cultural status into an understanding of global relations primarily through a lens of power. Pouliot and Mérand, “Bourdieu’s Concepts,” 37. On soft power, see Nye, Soft Power.
29 Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 245.
30 Bourdieu, Distinction, 124. Indeed, at one point he emphasizes that cinemas showing avant-garde films and theaters showing films “overtly designed to entertain” will tend to be found in different places (267). See also the work of Ghassan Hage, whose theories of “national cultural capital” and “cosmopolitan capital” offer geographically inflected adaptations of Bourdieu’s concept. The former refers to kinds of language, behavior, dress, taste, accent, and other “valued characteristics” that people deploy and embody which cause them to be seen by others as a legitimate member of a nation. The latter refers to one’s expressed interest in, knowledge of, and ability to cross borders and revel in diversity. See Hage, White Nation.
31 Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 92; Johnson, Heartland TV, 6.
32 Curtin, “Media Capital.”
33 Herbert, Videoland, 86–87.
34 Silverstone, Media and Morality, 18.
35 Consalvo, Atari to Zelda.
36 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire.
37 Consalvo, Cheating, 3–5.
38 Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway.
1 Gruenwedel, “Obama Gives Brown DVD Swag”; Walker, “Brown Is Frustrated.”
2 Another example: the Montreal Gazette newspaper reported in 2002 that someone in the Quebec Consumer Protection Office was dismayed to find that the DVDs he bought in France were unplayable in a Canadian DVD player. See Perusse, “Why DVD Releases Don’t Travel Well.”
3 Walker, “Brown Is Frustrated.”
4 My characterization of the global flows of entertainment as “disjunctive” takes inspiration from Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of global flows or “scapes,” wherein he asserts that those scapes are fractal and disjunctive in nature. See Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
5 Sebok, “Convergent Hollywood.” Central to Sebok’s argument is that the DVD developed through the convergence of three industries: filmed entertainment, consumer electronics, and computing.
6 Tryon, On-Demand Culture, 18; Benzon, “Bootleg Paratextuality,” 89.
7 For more on the cultural composition of so-called early adopters, see Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination; Cubitt, Timeshift, 9; Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 23; Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television.
8 See, for instance, Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema; Lobato and Thomas, Informal Media Economy; Mattelart, “Audio-Visual Piracy”; Starosielski, “Things and Movies”; Wang, Framing Piracy. Writing in 2007, Michael Curtin notes that pirated DVDs and Video CDs constituted over 90 percent of mainland China’s home video market. See Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience, 248–49.
9 Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box, 40; Wang, Framing Piracy; Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience, 80–84; Gray, “Mobility through Piracy,” 99–113; McDonald, Video and DVD Industries, 101–5; Larkin, Signal and Noise.
10 Silverstone, Media and Morality, 18.
11 Silverstone, 19.
12 While the region code is not technically a form of content encryption in that it does not scramble content or require a decryption key to access it, the mandated agreement between the software’s flag and the hardware’s region serves as a form of content protection that to the end user functions similarly. See Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified, 5–20.
13 Yu, “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” 193; DVD CCA, “About Us.”
14 Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified, 5–20; Yu, “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” 193.
15 Balio, “Major Presence,” 58–60.
16 McDonald, Video and DVD Industries, 1–2.
17 See Gomery, “Hollywood Studio System,” 120. Specifically, Gomery discusses the studios’ “run-zone-clearance” system of theatrical distribution, which David Bordwell summarizes thus: “A run was the period during which a film was screened in theatres. The first-run showing, usually at a well-appointed downtown cinema, gave city viewers the first chance to see the movie. The second-run shows, in neighborhood theatres and small towns, took place later, at lower ticket prices. Zones established the territory in which any title could play exclusively. Clearances were the intervals of time separating the runs, typically a matter of weeks or months.” Bordwell, “Women and Children First.”
18 Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video.
19 The fear of parallel imports was a major reason China and Southeast Asia were placed in their own distinct regions. Because of their bountiful informal DVD trades (i.e., what cultural industries and regulators call piracy), distributors could supposedly more easily control these spaces as DVD markets and ensure that pirated Region Four and Six DVDs did not show up in other places. Of course, in China’s case, that country’s unique and specific censorship practices also factored in. Remaining its own region would allow the country to more easily regulate the content of its DVDs. Yu, “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” 215.
20 Ulin, Business of Media Distribution, 5.
21 In a study of the economics of global film and television that appeared around the same time as the public availability of the DVD, Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn note that in order for market segmentation practices to engender the conditions that allow price discrimination to take place, “it must be possible for the seller to separate markets and keep them separate.” See Hoskins, McFadyen, and Finn, Global Television and Film, 69.
22 Taylor, “DVD Frequently Asked Questions.”
23 See Wang and Zhu, “Mapping Film Piracy in China,” 107–8, in which they note, “The VCD development has proved to be one of the most serious and unexpected challenges to the major studios and those transnational makers of electronic hardware that hold, determine, and monopolize video and audio entertainment formats and standards . . . the unexpected rebirth of the VCD in Asia has not only re-drawn the film distribution maps, both legitimate and illegitimate, but also redefined the power relations among various global as well as local players by reversing the flow of global video technology format and standardization.”
24 See, for example, Brookey and Westerfelhaus, “Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View”; Kompare, “Publishing Flow”; Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex; Gray, Show Sold Separately; Tryon, Reinventing Cinema.
25 “Regional Code Circumvention”; Andrews, “DVD Is Taking Off.”
26 For thorough histories of these events, see Sebok, “Convergent Hollywood”; Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified; Wasser, “Ancillary Markets”; Dai, Digital Revolution and Governance, 230–37.
27 Herman and McChesney, Global Media; Dai, Digital Revolution and Governance, 221.
28 Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified, 5.22.
29 Yu, “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” 196. As evidence of this, DVD companies that abjure region coding tend to offer boutique titles or material from industries with international distribution routes that don’t require the same digital borders. For example, region-free company DVD International’s first titles were Babes on the Beach and the home theater calibration disc Video Essentials. The same company also released the interactive “multipath film” I’m Your Man in 1998. See “Veteran Laserdisc Distributor”; Sporich, “‘Multipath DVD Movies.”
30 Perusse, “Why DVD Releases Don’t Travel Well.”
31 Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified, 2–3.
32 “Philips, Sony Go Solo.”
33 “Philips, Sony Go Solo”; Wasser, “Ancillary Markets,” 126.
34 “DVD Borders Sought.”
35 Homer, “Digital Video Discs.”
36 Apar, “DVD Leaves Laser Dealers in Doubt.” The author invokes a familiar system of global media incompatibility: the different technical standards for analog color television around the world: The United States’ National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) system, the UK and Europe’s Phase Alternating Line (PAL) standard, and Séquintiel Couleur à Mémoire (SECAM), used throughout France, Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Televisions and videocassette players functioning under one of the three different standards are not interoperable with technologies from another standard. DVD Forum chairman Koje Hase claimed in 2000 that region codes were no different from television “being regionalized with NTSC” and computers in different parts of the world shipping with different keyboards. However, this comparison obscures as much as it explains, as the DVD region code system is a different technology created with different motives. As an intentionally installed form of DRM, the region code operates along a much different logic than incompatible technical standards, but the elision of these two different systems served to legitimize the region code system by articulating it to the well-established and by that point de rigueur analog television system. See Cole, “DVD Forum’s Chairman,” 37.
37 Taylor, Johnson, and Crawford, DVD Demystified, 11–12.
38 Brass, “Cohen Admits Fall Launch.”
39 Parker, “DVD at the Brussels Forum,” 11.
40 Stalter and Homer, “DVD.”
41 “Another Hurdle Cleared.”
42 Stalter, “Sony, WB Set DVD Date,” 150.
43 Homer, “Digital Video Discs ,” 14; Arnold, “Oscar Noms Boon.”
44 Sweeting, “Digital Boom Shatters Distrib Windows.”
45 Andrews, “DVD Regional Coding Not Working,” 99.
46 “Problems Found with The Patriot DVD”; “RCE Fails to Halt Play.”
47 Sweeting, “Big Blue Kicks Codes.”
48 Whereas DVD split the world into six regions, Blu-ray discs are coded for three different regions (A, B, and C). Furthermore, the Blu-ray region code system is more lenient toward distributors and manufacturers. In other words, it is not a prerequisite to the studios licensing their content to home video distributors. Still, Blu-ray won its own format war against the rival HD DVD in part because the latter did not include region codes in its technological specifications. During the period when both formats existed at the same time, release dates for the same film would occasionally differ for each format so that the studios could exploit different markets before releasing a region-free version. For example, when New Line released Hairspray on Blu-ray and HD DVD, the studio put the Blu-ray version out in November 2007 but held the HD DVD version until early 2008. See Magiera and Clark, “New Line Goes High-Def.”
49 Sterne, MP3, 8.
50 Lessig, Code Version 2.0.
51 Kilker, “Shaping Convergence Media,” 24.
52 Virginia Haufler defines global governance as a form of regulation wherein corporations “reach collective decisions about transnational problems with or without government participation.” She notes that the 1990s saw increased initiative by multinational corporations across a number of industries to regulate their own operations with as little state interference as possible. Haufler, Public Role, 1. See also Mueller, Networks and States.
53 Sterne, MP3, 135; Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box, 70.
54 Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity; Sterne, MP3, 24.
55 Brass, “With DVD Specs Due.”
56 Sweeting, “Exemption Contempt.”
57 Havens, Global Television Marketplace. Xiudian Dai points out that the DVD’s creation took place through processes of “business networking involving a large number of companies, in the name of promoting global standardization.” Dai, Digital Revolution and Governance, 222.
58 “Doubts Grow for DVD Players.”
59 Brass, “Cohen Admits Fall Launch.”
60 Vonderau, “Beyond Piracy,” 114.
61 Vonderau, 112.
62 As Rob Stone argues about region codes, “Region 1 dominates by the mere fact of being called 1, in the same way that a westerner’s inclination to read from the top and left to right grants the USA pre-eminent status on a map of a round world that truly has no objective ‘up’ and could arguably be turned any which way.” Stone, “Notes from Region 2,” 9.
63 Krygier and Wood, “Ce N’est Pas Le Monde,” 198, 202. Krygier and Wood disagree with the notion that maps are forms of representation, but they define representation as a duplication or replication of the world and its spaces. Rather, I adopt a cultural studies–inflected understanding of representation as not a simple replication but as a proposition in its own right. John Fiske’s discussion of Gerardus Mercator’s sixteenth-century projection of the globe is illuminating here. The Mercator map distorted geographic space and privileged Europe by artificially inflating its size relative to other continents in order to ease global travel and trade. As Fiske points out, this strengthened colonial power both by operating as a “superb technology for capitalism” and by representing Europe as quite literally a larger global presence than it was. Fiske, Power Plays Power Works, 154. See also David Harvey’s call for greater focus on how particular institutions create geographic knowledge as well as John Pickles’s argument that maps “shape our understanding of the world, and how they code that world”; in “[coding] subjects and [producing] identities,” the contours of the region-code map perpetuate the valuation and devaluation of certain places and people. See Pickles, History of Spaces, 12; Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 209.
64 Said, Orientalism, 5. Here, Said employs a Foucauldian view of epistemic power. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about how the arrangement of spaces, and the distribution, hierarchical ordering, and control of people within those spaces, are forms of power. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205. Likewise, Charles Acland refers to Hollywood’s distribution maps as “a product of ideological agendas and political will.” Acland, Screen Traffic, 141.
65 Pickles, History of Spaces, 12.
66 “DVD Summit 2,” 13.
67 Tsing, Friction, 57. Cristina Venegas has called for closer emphasis on how media industries “construct regionality out of an assortment of sociopolitical circumstances and economic conditions.” See Venegas, “Thinking Regionally,” 122.
68 On industry lore, see Havens, Black Television Travels, 3. On trade storytelling, see Caldwell, Production Culture, 34.
69 “Europe Probes Role of Region Codes.” The inclusion of the United States and Canada in one region reflects the quasi-imperial industry practice of including Canadian box office numbers in the United States’ “domestic” box office total. See Acland, Screen Traffic; Hoskins, McFadyen, and Finn, Global Television and Film, 60.
70 “Europe Probes Role of Region Codes.”
71 “Europe Probes Role of Region Codes.”
72 Region codes often became a sort of shorthand for regional or national cultural difference in popular journalistic discourse. For example, in a rather strange essay by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Glover about a visit to Mexico’s Teotihuacan, the columnist points out that his Mexican tour guide calls himself a “zone-4 Johnny Depp.” The tour guide, aligned with Region Four on the DVD region code map, stands in as a copy of a Hollywood product from a different part of the world, with the implication that the Mexican Depp is Othered as a bootleg of the more authentic, highly valued Hollywood product. See Glover, “Nudes Bring Dickie Knee Back.”
73 Booth, “Product Test Report”; italics in original.
74 Stalter and Homer, “DVD.”
75 “Disney DVDs Carry Dual-Regional Coding.”
76 Borrowman, “ELAC Bounces Back.”
77 Rowe, “Globalization, Regionalization, and Australianization,” 51.
78 Dunt, Gans, and King, “Economic Consequences,” 37.
79 Saarinen, “DVDs.”
80 See, for example, Weatherall, “Locked In,” 21.
81 Sweeting, “Price to Be Paid”; Sweeting, “Nations Search for a Hidden Code.”
82 “Australians to Battle PlayStation.”
83 “Allan Fels Leads Investigation.”
84 Sweeting, “French Fried.” As a result of this, the Blu-ray Disc Association, the consortium responsible for developing the format, initially considered designating Australia and New Zealand region-free in their (voluntary) region code system, though they were eventually included in Region B with Europe, Africa, and much of the Middle East.
85 Malcolm, “How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens.”
86 “U.S. ‘the Enemy.’”
87 Malcolm, “Final Leaked TPP Text.”
88 Masnick, “With the U.S. Out.”
89 Bennett and Carter, “Introduction,” 2.
90 Bennett and Carter, 2.
91 Dunt, Gans, and King, “Economic Consequences,” 36n12.
1 Adelman, “@Cheesemeister3k.” “SNES” here refers to the company’s earlier, region-locked home console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (called Super Famicom in Japan).
2 Sheffield, “Brick Wall.”
3 Adelman, “Happy to announce.”
4 Gamers and game publications have built lists of Atari games and the different international TV formats on which they will work. See “Atari 2600 Format Conversions.”
5 Consalvo, “Console Video Games,” 122.
6 O’Hagan and Mangiron, Game Localization, 232–33.
7 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire.
8 Consalvo, Cheating.
9 While an in-depth look at online, PC, and mobile games is beyond the scope of this chapter’s focus on console gaming, it is worth mentioning that such games have not been subject to the exact same regional restrictions as console games—which is not to say they are not geoblocked. CD-ROMs and PC-DVDs were generally not region-locked, but mobile game availability is often contingent on the user’s geographic location. Furthermore, although this is not an issue of regional lockout per se, the user experience of online and PC games that require an internet connection depend on broadband quality and accessibility, which varies greatly around the world. The availability of fast broadband speeds in South Korea, for instance, has helped sustain a particularly robust online gaming culture. This is an instance where differences in gaming capital and geocultural capital come about not through the intentional lockout of certain territories by the industry, but through the presence of internet infrastructures. See Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire.
10 Kerr, Business and Culture of Digital Games, 55.
11 Aslinger, “Make Room for the Wii,” 212.
12 O’Donnell, “North American Game Industry,” 101–3.
13 Zackariasson and Wilson, “Introduction,” 3.
14 Ulin, Business of Media Distribution, 30.
15 Kerr, Business and Culture of Digital Games, 55.
16 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., Understanding Video Games, 14; O’Donnell, “This Is Not a Software Industry,” 24–25; Edwards, “Economics of Game Publishing.”
17 Ip and Jacobs, “Territorial Lockout,” 511.
18 Consalvo, “Console Video Games,” 131.
19 Consalvo, 131.
20 Alexander, “Report.”
21 Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam, 153n3.
22 Carless, Gaming Hacks, 191.
23 Altice, I Am Error, 91; O’Donnell, “Production Protection,” 59. Of course, this example highlights one difference between regional lockout in the game industry and the home video industry: whereas DVD region codes were put in place primarily by the Hollywood studios (i.e., the creators of texts and content) at the expense of hardware and software manufacturers, the development of lockout mechanisms in the console game industry was led by the hardware manufacturers at the expense of game developers and publishers. In other words, both industries’ implementation of lockout systems pitted manufacturers of technology and producers of texts against each other, but the power dynamics were quite different in each field.
24 Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, 109.
25 O’Hagan and Mangiron, Game Localization, 51.
26 Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, 111–12.
27 Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, 136.
28 Carless, Gaming Hacks, 194.
29 Carless, 194–95; Elusive, “Guide.”
30 Carless, 194.
31 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 74.
32 Aside from its metaphorical usefulness, theorists have taken up de/reterritorialization as an explanation for what John Tomlinson has referred to as the “weakening ties of culture to place” due in part to media technologies’ capacity for global connection. See Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, 29.
33 O’Hagan and Mangiron, Game Localization, 55.
34 As consoles became increasingly powerful and, through the logics of convergence, adopted more and more functions, popular narratives suggested that these technologies should have moved well past the compatibility issues familiar to consumer electronics. However, as Ian Bogost reminds us, “a spectre of incompatibility still hangs over consoles” despite these desires. See Bogost, “Xbox One.”
35 On “trusted systems” see Gillespie, Wired Shut, 9. On “tethered appliances” see Zittrain, Future of the Internet, 104.
36 Gibson, “No Region Locking for PS3?”
37 Nix, “GDC 06.”
38 Bramwell, “Wii Upholds Cube Region Lock”; Kietzmann, “Wii Not Even Remotely Region-Free.”
39 Plunkett, “Meet the First Ever Region-Locked PS3 Game.”
40 Good, “Persona 4 Arena.”
41 Rockstar Games, “Grand Theft Auto V”
42 For example, see “Region-Free Xbox 360 Games.”
43 O’Hagan and Mangiron, Game Localization, 114.
44 Ip and Jacobs, “Territorial Lockout,” 515.
45 Carless, Gaming Hacks, 191.
46 Schreier, “Xbox One Needs to Connect.”
47 Stuart, “Xbox One Region Lock.”
48 Pearson, “21 Launch Countries.”
49 Yoshida, “And yes”; Krupa, “PlayStation 4 Is Region-Free.”
50 Stuart, “Xbox One DRM Restrictions Dropped.”
51 Phillips, “Nintendo Blames Region-Locking”; George, “Nintendo’s President Discusses Region Locking.”
52 Link_Is_My_Homie, “Region Locked.”
53 Whitehead, “Talking Point.”
54 Olivarez-Giles, “Nintendo Defends Wii U Region Locking”; “Top Posts in Miiverse Community.”
55 Cheesemeister, “Let’s Convince Nintendo.”
56 Stevens, “Stop Region Blocking.”
57 As Charles Bernstein reminds us, read-only memory “is out of sight only to control more efficiently.” Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” 166.
58 Ashcraft, “Should Digital Games Be Region Locked?”
59 Ashcraft.
60 Consalvo, “Unintended Travel.”
61 Edwards, “Performing a Permanent Famicom to NES Game Conversion.”
62 “NES Cart Converters.”
63 Bhaduri, “Gaming”; Burke, “Future in a Vault of Plastic,” 99.
64 Payne, “Connected Viewing, Connected Capital,” 188.
65 Carless, Gaming Hacks, 192.
66 Consalvo, Cheating, 183.
67 Jenkins, “Modded Xbox 360s Blocked.”
68 “The Myths of Modding.”
69 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 86.
70 Consalvo, Cheating, 85. Many scholars have stressed that rules are part of what makes a game a unique and particular form of social experience. They are crucial to the procedural rhetoric that Ian Bogost argues is central to games; Alexander Galloway begins his book on games by calling them “[activities] defined by rules.” See Bogost, Persuasive Games; Galloway, Gaming, 1. For more on the importance of rules to games, see Crawford, Video Gamers, 68–70.
71 Consalvo, Cheating, 7.
72 Dymek, “Video Games,” 38–39.
73 Carless, Gaming Hacks, 190.
74 Whitehead, “Talking Point”; italics in original.
75 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 81; italics in original. On video games and gender, see Cassell and Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat; Kafai et al., Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat; Nakamura, “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game”; Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers”; Fisher, “Sexy, Dangerous—and Ignored”; Chess, Ready Player Two.
76 Jordan, Hacking, 124–26.
77 O’Donnell, “North American Game Industry,” 110.
78 Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, 81–91.
79 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 86.
80 Morley, Home Territories, 68. See also Freeman, “Is Local.”
81 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 84–85.
82 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, xv.
83 Link_Is_My_Homie, “Region Locked.”
84 Rashy, “Arab Gamer Episode 3.”
85 Ito, “Japanese Media Mixes”; Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji, Fandom Unbound.
86 Ito, “Japanese Media Mixes,” 51–52.
87 Bowling, “Beginner’s Guide.”
88 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 27.
89 Consalvo, Atari to Zelda, 33.
1 Netflix, “Netflix CES 2016 Keynote.”
2 Lobato, Netflix Nations.
3 On the disconnect between popular notions of television’s ubiquity and the reality of uneven access, see Stewart, “Myth of Televisual Ubiquity.”
4 Lobato, Netflix Nations.
5 Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity, 11–12.
6 Kompare, “Cult Streaming”; Tryon, On-Demand Culture; Dixon, Streaming; Iordanova, “Digital Disruption.”
7 For more on the practices and technologies of geoblocking, see Lobato, “New Video Geography.”
8 Ashraf and León, “Logics and Territorialities of Geoblocking,” 42; Deibert et al., Access Contested, 17.
9 Even a recent legal analysis of geoblocking suggests that “though physical borders—and sometimes difficult to surmount digital borders—still exist, the reality is that most things can be obtained online.” See Burnett, “Geographically Restricted Streaming Content,” 463.
10 Dalley, “Navigating Online Geoblocking.”
11 Ng, “Finding a New Future.”
12 Galvin, “What Is . . . Geoblocking?”
13 Tryon, On-Demand Culture, 41.
14 Urquhart and Wagman, “This Content Is Not Available,” 125.
15 Lobato, “Politics of Digital Distribution.”
16 Stewart, “Myth of Televisual Ubiquity,” 702.
17 Turner, “Content Unlimited.” See also Lobato and Meese, “Australia.”
18 “Committee Seeks IT Pricing Equity.”
19 As Deb Verhoeven points out, the Australian film industry has often positioned itself against a perceived American commercial culture—here, manifesting as conglomerate Hollywood. See Verhoeven, “Film, Video, DVD, and Online Delivery,” 153–54.
20 Lobato and Meese, “Australia.”
21 O’Donnell, “Sky Beware,” 10.
22 Fellenbaum, “Slingshot Users in New Zealand.”
23 As Marketa Trimble has pointed out, this out-of-court settlement has kept the legality of circumvention in a gray area. See Trimble, “Geoblocking, Technical Standards, and the Law,” 60.
24 Healey, “New Zealand ISP’s ‘Global Mode.’”
25 Lobato and Meese have argued that politicians opportunistically used geoblocking as a way to blend populist, nationalist rhetoric with free-market ideologies. See Lobato and Meese, “Australia,” 122–23.
26 Duckett, “‘Australia Tax’ Is Real.”
27 “Committee Seeks IT Pricing Equity.”
28 Cartwright, “Arrested Development.”
29 “Choice’s Letter to Netflix.”
30 Cartwright, “Arrested Development.”
31 Silverstone, Media and Morality, 18.
32 Here, I focus mainly on the iPlayer’s television programming, as its radio programs are not subject to many of the same geographic restrictions as its television broadcasts.
33 Lawler, “BBC Brings Global iPlayer”; “BBC Global iPlayer to Close.”
34 Hern, “BBC iPlayer’s US Rollout Blocked.”
35 Lotz, Portals.
36 Gillespie, “Politics of Platforms,” 348.
37 Govil, “Thinking Nationally,” 138.
38 Hall, “Which Public, Whose Service?” quoted in Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity, 196.
39 Bennett et al., Multiplatforming Public Service Broadcasting, 18.
40 Bennett et al., 24. See also Miller, Something Completely Different; Becker, “From High Culture to Hip Culture”; Steemers, Selling Television.
41 Klosowski, “How an American Can Stream.”
42 Pash, “How to Access.”
43 Nederkorn, “I’m an American.”
44 Pash, “How to Access”; italics added.
45 Pash.
46 Pash.
47 Such comments also illustrate the distinct relationship among American and British viewers and broadcasting industries—one based, as Michele Hilmes has shown, on a long-standing, complex history of both mutual influence and strategic opposition. See Hilmes, Network Nations.
48 For more on the BBC as a national public utility, see Scannell and Cardiff, Social History of British Broadcasting.
49 Jackson, “BBC iPlayer Users Will Have to Pay.”
50 Kemp, “BBC Director General Tony Hall.”
51 Newman, “Free TV.”
52 Sorrel, “BBC Launches Subscription-Based.”
53 “E.U. Wants iPlayer Access.”
54 Fiveash, “Netflix Abroad Set for Showtime.”
55 Science|Business, “EU Vice-President Ansip.”
56 European Commission, “Geo-Blocking.”
57 “Europe Probes Role of Region Codes”; Goldstein, “International Quarrel with Codes.”
58 European Parliament, “Written Questions.”
59 “Priority.”
60 Schmidt, “Why Europe Needs a Digital Single Market”; Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology.”
61 Roxborough, “Can Europe Set Up a Digital Single Market?”; Roxborough, “What’s behind a Europe Plan.”
62 Baker, “Netflix, Amazon Given Quotas.”
63 Stone, “Notes from Region 2,” 10.
64 Morley, Home Territories, 259.
65 Uricchio, “We Europeans?” 12.
1 SpotifyVideoChannel, “Spotify.”
2 Morris and Powers, “Control, Curation and Musical Experience,” 107.
3 Morris and Powers, 107.
4 Harvey, “Station to Station.”
5 Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 250; Rogers, Death and Life, 70.
6 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Global Music Report, 6.
7 Negus, “Corporate Strategies,” 23.
8 Burnett, Global Jukebox, 27.
9 Negus, “Corporate Strategies,” 25.
10 Pohlmann, Compact Disc Handbook, 11; Philips Research, “History of the CD.”
11 Morris, Selling Digital Music, 74.
12 Garofalo, “I Want My MP3,” 88.
13 Kernfeld, Pop Song Piracy, 180.
14 Kernfeld, 181.
15 Indeed, contrast this with the case of the DVD’s CSS and region code technical standards, analyzed in chapter 1. On the MP3 and media globalization, see Sterne, MP3, 24.
16 Reports on Spotify have shown that the cost of music licensing—which grows as the platform moves into new markets—has been an impediment to the still-unprofitable company’s ability to make money. See Mak, “What Spotify’s Lack of Profits May Mean.”
17 Rand, “Cost of Spotify Premium.”
18 Burkart and McCourt, Digital Music Wars, 32–33.
19 See, for example, Pogue, “Online Music, Unshackled.”
20 Hong, “As Spotify Passes One Year in Asia”; Steimle, “Spotify Plans to Own.”
21 Fagenson, “Spotify Eyes Latin America.”
22 Harvey, “Station to Station”; Walker, “Song Decoders.”
23 Sherman, “Pandora Touts 200 Million Listeners.”
24 Harvey, “Station to Station.” This is due to a regulatory distinction between public performance (e.g., on terrestrial radio and in public spaces) and digital public performance (e.g., on satellite and internet radio stations like SiriusXM and Pandora). The former pays out royalties to publishers and songwriters where the latter pays out royalties to labels and performing artists.
25 Rushton, “Listing Values Loss-Making Site”; Peoples, “Business Matters.”
26 Resnikoff, “Europeans Have No Idea.”
27 Connell and Gibson, Sound Tracks, 44; Lacey, “Listening in the Digital Age.”
28 Kusek and Leonhard, Future of Music, 3. See also Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening. Several writers have also pointed out that the metaphor of “the cloud” likewise invokes a condition of immateriality that ignores the physical infrastructures that keep digital media running. See Holt and Vonderau, “Where the Internet Lives,” 82; Morris, Selling Digital Music, 168.
29 Burkart and McCourt, Digital Music Wars, 4; Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway.
30 Hilmes, Radio Voices, 13–14.
31 Streeter, Selling the Air, 61.
32 Hilmes, Radio Voices, 15.
33 Connell and Gibson, Sound Tracks, 9–10.
34 Vonderau, “Spotify Effect”; Morris and Powers, “Control, Curation and Musical Experience.”
35 Harvey, “Station to Station.”
36 Burkart and McCourt, Digital Music Wars, 5.
37 adfhogan, “Re: Cost of Spotify Premium.”
38 Smith, “Web Services Grow.”
39 Hamilton, “Spotify Smooths Exit”; O’Malley Greenburg, “Nielsen’s Mid-Year Report.”
40 McWilliams, “Singing Coke’s Praises Evolves.”
41 Pogue, “Online Music, Unshackled.”
42 “Spotify Begins Rollout.”
43 Hong, “As Spotify Passes One Year in Asia”; “Spotify Sets Sights.”
44 Marsden, “One Giant Jukebox.”
45 Morris and Powers, “Control, Curation and Musical Experience,” 111.
46 Spotify, “Musical Map.”
47 Roettgers, “Spotify Puts the World’s Music.”
48 Van Buskirk, “Serendipity Visualizes Simultaneous Listening”; McDonald, Serendipity.
49 Zuckerman, “Homophily, Serendipity, Xenophilia”; Van Buskirk.
50 Van Buskirk.
51 Pelly, “Problem with Muzak.”
52 Leight, “Why Isn’t Jamaican Dancehall Bigger.”
53 Pelly, “Discover Weakly.”
54 Zuckerman, Digital Cosmopolitans.
55 David Hesmondhalgh’s 1996 writing, where he expresses skepticism about the argument that global music markets were becoming increasingly fragmented, feels prescient here. As he pointed out, “It seems likely that the globalization and horizontal integration of the cultural industries has emphasized the central importance of a small number of major acts.” See Hesmondhalgh, “Flexibility, Post-Fordism,” 483.
56 Berland, “Locating Listening,” 133.
57 Hosokawa, “Walkman Effect,” 166.
58 Sprenger, “Network Is Not the Territory,” 4.
59 Vonderau, “Spotify Effect,” 4.
60 Douglas, Listening In, quoted in Harvey, “Station to Station.” On streaming music’s approaches toward defining and constructing the “individual,” see Prey, “Nothing Personal.”
61 Carr, “Spotify Announces US Launch”; Peoples, “Business Matters.”
62 Pogue, “Online Music, Unshackled.”
63 Bourdieu, Distinction, 10.
64 Burkart, Music and Cyberliberties, 2. See also Lessig, Free Culture.
1 Motherboard, “Peru’s DVD Pirates.”
2 Thussu, “Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow.”
3 Sterne, MP3, 7.
4 Hu, “Closed Borders and Open Secrets.”
5 Dwyer and Uricaru, “Slashings and Subtitles,” 50.
6 Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 36.
7 Fiske, 39.
8 Foley, “Doctor Who Knows No Borders.”
9 Morley, Home Territories, 33.
10 Morley, 103.
11 Lobato, Netflix Nations.
12 “Region-Free DVD Deck Sales.”
13 “DVD Regionalization Strategy in Tatters.”
14 “Issues Remain for Euro Market.”
15 Rivero, “Lee’s Tiger on the Loose.”
16 Frost, “Middle East Sees 20% IT Growth.”
17 “Use of Spanish DVD Tracks.”
18 “Regional Code Circumvention More Prevalent in Europe.”
19 Powell, “Remote Regions”; “Use of Spanish DVD Tracks.”
20 “Internet Offers Detailed ‘How-To.’”
21 Creed, “Internet Update.”
22 Clarke, “Break Down Blu-ray Borders.”
23 Christophers, Envisioning Media Power, 149.
24 Miles, “Click Here for Easy Wish Fulfillment”; “Mod Chips Now Legal”; Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “Consumers in Dark.”
25 Borrowman, “All the World’s a Stage.”
26 “Microsoft Launches X-Box.”
27 Cole, “DVD Forum’s Chairman.”
28 “Region-Free DVD Deck Sales.”
29 “John Barker’s Gaithersburg Address.”
30 Anderson, Long Tail.
31 Luh, “Breaking Down DVD Borders.”
32 For more on this, see Naficy, “Narrowcasting in Diaspora.”
33 Cunningham, “Popular Media as Public ‘Sphericules,’” 133.
34 See, for instance, Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change; Naficy, Making of Exile Cultures; Punathambekar, “Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora”; Kim, “Diasporic Nationalism and the Media.”
35 Kolar-Panov, “Video and the Macedonians,” 111.
36 Punathambekar, “Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora,” 154–55.
37 Beaty and Sullivan, Canadian Television Today, 123.
38 Lewis and Hirano, “Mi Arai Mai Mai Mai?” 199–200.
39 Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, 22.
40 Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema.
41 “Chinese Code-Free DVD Maker.”
42 “Hardware Notes.”
43 Lewis and Hirano, “Mi Arai Mai Mai Mai?” 185.
44 As mentioned elsewhere in this book, Ramon Lobato points out that informal media economies are, in fact, “everyday, banal phenomena.” Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema, 48–49. See also Wang, Framing Piracy, 185.
45 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 27–32.
46 In order to preserve confidentiality, references to interviews will include the city and/or neighborhood and type of establishment but will not include the names of people or establishments.
47 Here, a gendered split was apparent in the kind of labor undertaken in these stores, wherein the more traditionally feminized domains of garment production and design contrasted with the male manager’s more active role as the DVD salesperson and point of interaction for consumers (as well as an interviewer like myself). While the man running the store took phone calls and spoke to me as the official representative of the establishment, the women working at the store undertook more mundane tasks and gendered forms of work. Such labor divisions recall arguments from Youna Kim and Ien Ang that diasporic existence should not be idealized and that scholarship on such modes of existence should emphasize marginalization, alienation, and gendered discrimination. See Kim, “Diasporic Nationalism and the Media”; and Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese.
48 At the same time, a dynamic seems to be taking shape that reflects broader shifts in media consumption. Many of my interviewees indicated that DVD sales have slumped (and in some places completely fallen off) due to the availability of video streaming platforms which are not beholden to the region code system. They suggested that consumers were increasingly forsaking DVD for platforms like YouTube and online pirated file sharing. This has the possibility of disarticulating diasporic media experience from a particular locality (by making the local video store less essential as a community outpost for cultural engagement). For more on this dynamic, see Elkins, “Changing Scales of Diasporic Media Retail.”
49 Herbert, Videoland, 123.
50 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 108.
51 Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan point out that non-Asian cinephiles regularly flock to Asian markets to pick up cheap bootlegs of Hong Kong action films, for example. See Beaty and Sullivan, Canadian Television Today, 123.
52 Keathley, Cinephilia and History, 15; Klinger, “DVD Cinephile,” 23.
53 Elsaesser, “Cinephilia,” 30.
54 Jenkins, “Pop Cosmopolitanism.” See also Mia Consalvo’s discussion of cosmopolitanism among video game consumers who have used the medium to connect with Japanese culture. Consalvo, Atari to Zelda.
55 For more on this, see Klinger, “DVD Cinephile,” 25–26.
56 Clarke, “Studios Divide and Rule.”
57 Dargis, “21st Century Cinephile.”
58 Rosenbaum, “Global Discoveries on DVD.”
59 Elsaesser describes this as a “post-auteur, post-theory cinephilia that has embraced the new technologies, that flourishes on the internet and finds its jouissance in an often undisguised and unapologetic fetishism of the technical prowess of the digital video disc, its sound and its image and the tactile sensations now associated with both.” Elsaesser, “Cinephilia,” 36. For more on this, see Tryon, Reinventing Cinema.
60 Klinger, “DVD Cinephile,” 27.
61 Darren, “Criterion Criteria.”
62 Darren.
63 On the Californian Ideology, see Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology.”
64 Herbert, Videoland, 86. See also Curtin, “Media Capital.”
65 “Readers’ Comments.”
66 Hawkins, “Culture Wars.”
67 On “subcultural capital,” see Thornton, Club Cultures.
68 Rosenbaum and Martin, Movie Mutations, 185.
69 Dotcom, “MPAA.”
70 Zuckerman, “Homophily, Serendipity, Xenophilia.” Similarly, Henry Jenkins talks about how “pop cosmopolitans,” or people who engage international culture through popular culture, “[walk] a thin line between dilettantism and connoisseurship, between orientalist fantasies and a desire to honestly connect and understand an alien culture, between assertion of mastery and surrender to cultural difference.” See Jenkins, “Pop Cosmopolitanism,” 127.
71 As David Morley argues, “The figure of the cosmopolitan, like that of the flaneur, is clearly masculine, and is often a symbolic figure of the West and its sophistications marked out against a backward other.” Morley, Home Territories, 231.
72 Tsing, “Global Situation,” 343–44.
73 Schaeffer-Grabiel, “Planet-Love.com,” 337.
74 Gray, Video Playtime.
75 Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 89.
76 Rollux, message board post.
77 As Mimi White reminds us, the man cave trope is a response to the idea that “houses in general, and the varied domestic activities and habits they contain, are redolent with femininity.” White, “Gender Territories,” 240. See also the work of James Kendrick, who discovers that for many men “the creation of a home theater environment within the domestic space is a way of reworking the gendered nature of television and its association with everydayness into a masculine domain of control.” Kendrick, “Aspect Ratios and Joe Six-Packs,” 65.
78 Here I use Greg Taylor’s definition of cultism, which “identifies and refuses ‘mass’ taste by developing a resistant cult taste for more obscure and less clearly commodified cultural objects.” See Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 15.
79 Wollen, “Auteur Theory,” 72.
80 Pizowell, “Unboxing OREI Region Free 3D Blu-ray Player.”
81 Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 132.
82 “How to Bypass Geo-Blocking in Australia.”
83 Mōri, “Winter Sonata and Cultural Practices,” 134.
84 Eng, “Strategies of Engagement,” 100.
85 Becker, “Access Is Elementary.”
1 “Can Guns N’ Roses.”
2 Ashraf and León, “Logics and Territorialities,” 52.
3 For more on the Pirate Party, see Burkart, Pirate Politics.
4 Lobato and Meese, Geoblocking and Global Video Culture.
5 Morley, Home Territories, 235.
6 Morley, 23. Here, he draws on Wilson, “New Cosmopolitanism,” 355.
7 Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change, 206. On cultures of cosmopolitanism, see the work of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. He argues that cosmopolitanism requires both “obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” as well as the need to “take seriously the value not just of human lives but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.” Ethan Zuckerman responds to Appiah’s summary by quipping, “My taste for sushi and my fondness for Afropop are insufficient to make me a cosmopolitan.” In other words, to be truly cosmopolitan, consumer culture cannot simply be branded as superficially “global” without an appreciation of difference grounded in ethical obligations toward shared humanity. See Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv; Zuckerman, Digital Cosmopolitans, 24.
8 Acland, Screen Traffic, 44.
9 Jenkins, “Pop Cosmopolitanism,” 133–36.
10 Luh, “Breaking Down DVD Borders.”
11 Kayahara, “Digital Revolution.”; Ecke, “Coping with the DVD Dilemma.”
12 Puckett, “Digital Rights Management,” 11.
13 Hovet, “YouTube and Archives.”
14 “The Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement,” 160.
15 Becker, “Access Is Elementary.”
16 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 5.
17 Silverstone, Media and Morality, 31.
18 Silverstone, 54.
19 Postigo, Digital Rights Movement, 116.
20 Levy, Hackers, 23, quoted in Postigo, 116.
21 Eschenfelder, Howard, and Desai, “Ethics of DeCSS Posting.”