The global cultural ghetto
The Criterion Collection —the preeminent distributor of classic films on DVD—launched a beautiful new website recently. Among its many features, it allows you to watch films online for $5… but only if you live in North America. This is incredibly frustrating! All these amazing movies, available instantly… not!
If you live in or near a major metropolitan area (or near a university) in the US or Canada, you probably already have some way to watch Au Revoir Les Enfants or The Thief of Baghdad. Those of us living in cultural backwaters can’t enjoy such luxuries. The Panama City metro area (where I am) has more than a million inhabitants, but our sole access to decent cinema consists of a single Blockbuster store with a few shelves of the usual suspects: a bit of Fellini, some Kurosawa, some Hitchcock, etc. We have no art house theaters, only mall cineplexes blasting the latest superhero fluff. And as poor as our movie selection is, it’s still much broader than the music available: basically if you don’t like merengue, plena, or 1980s discount-rack soft rock you’re shit out of luck.
Why is Criterion shutting me out? For that matter, why can’t I legally buy MP3s or movies from Amazon’s online store, when I can order from them a slab of plastic containing the same bits and have it shipped to me, using up resources and crapping on the environment? Perhaps the argument is that not many people here are interested in this stuff. True enough, but so what? How much more can it cost these companies to open these digital distribution channels? Is it more than it costs to install and maintain the filters that keep people like me from becoming customers?
The internet was supposed to level the playing field for those of us that live in culturally isolated regions. But now that technology has matured to the point where cultural artifacts—music, movies, TV shows, and books—can be purchased, distributed, and experienced online, companies are doing their damnedest to maintain the old structures intact. The net result: global access to culture is constrained to a bizarro long tail, a ghetto defined by corporate lawyers and accountants.
I’m living in Panama right now and I can say that situation here is not so bad as in small cities of Russia
There you need to pay much more for the internet and that’s why it’s difficult to use torrents (I think you know what is that 
Here you have at least this option…
P.S. – Blockbuster is funny. It has SO small selection. I don’t understand how this company can survive
Hi Indra, thanks for your comment. I don’t get media off torrents… notice I explicitly said I want to legally buy this stuff.
As someone who produces cultural artifacts for a living (websites, in my case), I know that it takes a lot of work (and money) to produce these things. So I want to make sure that the people who make the movies, music, books, etc. get paid. My main gripe is that they are not giving me the opportunity to give them my money.
I’m sure it’s not just Criterion shutting you out… Can you access the video on http://hulu.com/ ? Probably not.
And your European friends often have the same complaints.
Criterion only has rights to show these videos in the United States (possibly not even Canada). I’m sure they’d love for you to pay $5 and watch from Panama, but their hands are tied by what can only be described as byzantine international copyright law.
And the DMCA doesn’t make it any easier. Don’t blame Criterion. Blame studios and lawmakers the world over.
Hi Peter, you’re right to point out that this isn’t Criterion’s fault. (And yes, Hulu is also blocked from here.)—Note I splattered a broad brush at “corporate lawyers and accountants.”
Criterion, Hulu, and Amazon are the distribution end of a medium that is still defined by rules set up for a totally different business ecosystem. I’ve seen very little movement from them, or any other players, to move things in a future-facing direction.
It’s clearly not that they can’t see the value in digital distribution: just this week Atlantic Records announced that their digital sales are now higher than CDs. The old model doesn’t scale, why can’t they see past it?
(Of course, you could argue that the fact that these sites exist at all is proof that they do see past it. Perhaps it’s a matter of time, and I’m just impatient and frustrated because of reading about long tails and flat worlds that only exist in piecemeal.)