The piracy issue makes me want to tear my hair out at times. I do not understand how so many of my filmmaker colleagues have bought into this MPAA propaganda. Recently these think tanks and organizations have popped up which are not officially associated with the MPAA, but definitely on their payroll.
Hmmm, who does that remind me of....? Oh yeah...
The Koch brothers.
But okay, you want to be mad at the kid in Sweden or Australia for uploading your movie? Go for it. Oh wait, in cases like Expendables 3 it's actually someone here in Hollywood leaking it.
This by the way opens up all kinds of possibilities. I'm not suggesting anything, but hypothetically , if there were an anonymous address people could send not-yet-released movie DVDs to, so someone else could upload them without a chance of it being backtracked to the source, then a whole bunch of abused and mistreated assistants wouldn't be defenseless anymore.
It's kind of like going to a restaurant and thinking twice about insulting the waiter or busboy because you're afraid of what they'll put in the food before they bring it back. Imagine those famously abusive directors, producers or stars (#notall....) having to tone down the abuse, otherwise LOUD EVENT MOVIE # 5 will show up on the piratebay with a little note that says: "Don't bother seeing this in the theater. Everybody above the line was a monster to us."
Maybe the MPAA should drop some of their $$ on PSAs about the danger of abusing assistants: "If you kick me everyday, your film will land on piratebay."
I'm having admittedly too much fun with this but this post is supposed to be about geo blocking.
I don't need to talk about the fact that social media has turned film and TV fans into a global community. Everybody knows that Twitter will blow up when Game of Thrones premiers, so what would ever prevent foreign buyers negotiating a simultaneous release...I have no idea.
The fact that there are many expats all over the world who are jonesing for some homegrown media once in a while, I've already mentioned in my previous blog. It's funny, I can go to World Cost Plus and buy a German chocolate bar for five times as much money as it costs back home and you know what? I am cool with that. Happy to pay import taxes and costs for a bite of home. But if I want to watch a German sports show and get some Bundesliga news, I have to go all gangster on the net with sneaky incognito apps and devices.
Has the world gone mad? I would like to pay for a visitor pass or a tourist visa for a cyber journey onto a German TV network site, which is on top of it, a public network. Why is that not possible? Do you not need the money? Do you not want it? Is it economically smarter for you to invest tons of money into geo blocking technology that will be hacked faster than you can say Auf Wiedersehen?
And it's the same for the US, worse actually, because everybody in the world wants to watch US shows and everybody in the world is also smarter about geo blocking -or hacking for that matter- than anybody in the US. So basically, the US is blocking-blocking-blocking while the world is watching-watching-watching.
You can't tell me this isn't part of a bigger plan, because no shareholder would stand by and watch such counter productive business measures continue.
But because I'm not writing these posts for Pirates and instead hope to entice some of my filmmaker colleagues to dig deeper, let me bring up some lesser known issues.
This geo blocking thing is about a lot more than copyright and territories. Over and over again, I have observed aggressive maneuvers by establishments to keep people behind the borders of their own country. And I am not talking about entertainment or music outlets here, or about countries like China or Iran. I'm talking about sitting at an airport in Europe unable to pull up a Huffington Post article someone wanted me to read for over an hour, as I was getting redirected to the newly established German version of HuffPo in a way that had me convinced my computer was hacked. And that wasn't the only site, I needed to look up instructions on how to get around every country-redirecting trick pretty much every time I wanted to do anything on US sites. Having been an expat for quite some time, I am not a beginner when it comes to cyber country hopping, so it didn't take me that long because I was completely clueless.
I was just taken back on how aggressively European countries worked on keeping people inside their walls and how equally hard the US tried to keep them outside.
I'm allergic to walls. Nothing good comes from preventing people communicating and traveling, even if it's just from their armchair.
Here is the biggest beef I have with those in power, trying to control what we see, when we see it and how we see it. Do you honestly think they're making choices based on our best interests?
We're not getting to see some of the best shows Europe is producing. Yes, Netflix helps and thank God for them, but they can't buy everything. The excuse is always that Americans don't want to watch anything with subtitles. So it either gets remade or it will never make it over here....
...except through Pirate waters. And then you find out that not only are young Americans passionately searching for more Scandinavian crime shows, French mini-series, or German car shows on certain torrent sites (not that I've ever been on one), but there are young Europeans who will PRODUCE subtitles for these shows voluntarily, so their American friends can watch them.
OH SNAP! Generation Z is neither stupid nor lazy.
But what happens with an underground subtitle site? It gets raided by Swedish Police and shut down.
https://torrentfreak.com/fan-created-subtitle-site-raided-by-swedish-police-130710/
Let me repeat this, in case it didn't sink in: Young people spend their free time to translate movies and TV shows so people in other countries can see them and what do we do? We shut them down. Well good job world! They shouldn't be doing such naughty things, why aren't they out there fighting a war or something else productive? Translating TV shows...those hoodlums.
And we are part of this my Hollywood friends. When the Swedish Police raids an underground subtitle site it's only because of White House pressure which in turn comes from MPAA lobbyists. So the next time you sign up for some MPAA propaganda stuff or you write a letter on their behalf, you're the person standing behind the Swedish Cop as he/she kicks some poor subtitle writing kid's door in.
One last thing about subtitles you should also know. There's another lie out there in certain countries, Germany for sure, France, Russia I believe...that every American show needs to be synchronized because not everybody speaks English and nobody watches anything with subtitles. I can only speak for Germany, although I have heard these complaints from many other people around the world: Synchronization always sucks. For one, it's like streaming a show that is never quite in sync and two, every actor no matter if they are Asian, African American, Latino...will have a white person synchronizing them. The Germans will probably cry "we don't have enough minority voice talent." BULLSHIT. You're not even trying to find them, train them or even put a "best effort to first find minority" rule in place,
I couldn't figure out why my Mother doesn't like the show Scandal, until I saw this:
No wonder people prefer the pirated, original version.
The conclusion I have come to is that those with the power of greenlighting, distributing or licensing content (Netflix excluded) don't understand who the global audience is or they don't care who they are.
All around the world revolutions have started with the help of international online activism, do you really think those same people prefer to wait for a synchronized show rather than watching the authentic version with everyone else?
The same goes for American audiences, if they were all too lazy and too stupid to read subtitles, why are European kids spending their time translating and uploading homegrown shows for Americans?
This is precisely why I have decided to focus on creating international TV shows, rather than the usual fare that comes my way or that people expect me to be interested in. I believe in a global community and that people are genuinely curious and interested in other cultures and traditions. I believe that the majority of us want stories that reflect the world not the status quo. And God knows I will not stop until there is at least one, three-dimensional, realistic, Middle Eastern protagonist out there.
I also have faith in Gen Z, much more faith than I have in old Hollywood.
Peace out
Lexi