[shaunol]

This is a cool idea but it still falls very short by not serving users outside of the US. To the point where the welcome page doesn't even acknowledge that there may be global interest: https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/ (enter your ZIP code, no country picker ... YouTube, you do realize you're on the internet, right?)

Does YouTube care about getting content to the world? Or just getting as many of their fingers in the pie as possible and abusing the current geo-restricted licensing model while they can?

[mikekchar]

As someone who has lived in many different countries, I find this stuff so frustrating. When I was living in England, my wife and I wanted to watch Japanese anime (in Japanese). Luckily Crunchyroll exists and it has quite a large amount of content for a very low price (I think we were paying 4 pounds per month). But now that I'm back in Japan, we want to watch shows from BBC... basically not possible legally. I really enjoyed watching cycling on Eurosport. Good luck.

I really wonder who is going to pay $35 a month for US shows, while you are already in the US. There are just so many other ways to get that content.

I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.

[unityByFreedom]

> I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.

If not, at least you can die laughing

[myrandomcomment]

You can watch iPlayer via a VPN or DNS service like unblock.us (do not know if they have service in Japan).

Note to the BBC - I would be to pay 3x the license fee to be able to watch on the internet with a subscription from outside the U.K. I bet if you opened it up world wide you would make more money then you do on the all the U.K license fees.

[mikekchar]

Even the BBC isn't powerful enough to do this. I can't remember who it was but one of the heads of the BBC said for a long time that content on BBC should be available for free everywhere. He reasoned that it was already paid for. It's one of the reason that they do so much free software development.

One of the shows that I want to watch is Match of the Day. Not sure what the situation is like now, but when I was in the UK the BBC was having a huge problem trying to negotiate the rights to put it on the iPlayer (strangely MOTD2 was OK ???). It would be impossible if they needed international distribution :-(

[patrickk]

For freeview UK channels, you can watch some of them on FilmOn[1]

I'm a rugby fan and it's possible to watch high quality, BBC or ITV coverage of the Six Nations from abroad (BBC Scotland on Wales/Scotland has the higher quality for free). I'm pretty sure that Americans can't watch it though judging by comments on Reddit.

[1] https://www.filmon.com/tv/bbc-news

[stevekemp]

I moved from Scotland to Finland, and one of the things I really missed was UK TV. I'd love to have paid for it, but there aren't any really great options.

Initially I bought a NowTV subscription, with a home-made proxy setup. That worked for a long time, but then they caught on, and most of the VPN-providers became blacklisted too.

Nowadays I'm using FilmOn with a Roku box. I've slowly weaned myself off UK TV, but there are afternoons where I just want to sit on a sofa and watch two hours of "Come Dine With Me" for the snarking. I wish I could pay for it ..

[ciaranm]

Both Match of the Day's are now available on the iPlayer every week - I think from the Tuesday after airing. Still a bunch of asinine restrictions, but it's there. I remember it was like you say when they first started it.

[dazc]

I disagree since I am already paying for a licence in the UK I am barely able to take advantage of (I live outside the UK for 9 months a year). I am rather annoyed that I have do a workaround to watch stuff I have paid for.

I get especially annoyed when I also have to 'prove' I have a licence by ticking a box.

In other words, it's easier to get for free outside the UK than it is to pay for it.

[croon]

> You can watch iPlayer via a VPN or DNS service like unblock.us (do not know if they have service in Japan).

Just had to do a second take to appreciate the irony of a geoblocking circumvention service being geoblocked.

[guyzero]

It's probably not even possible to offer US cable networks outside of the US. They only have licenses from the content creators to show inside the US.

Besides, all their competitors are US only as well - Sling TV, DirecTV Now.

Someday who knows, but for now live linear is very region-locked.

[frandroid]

Parent's point is still valid. There's another 3+ billion of internet users outside the U.S., it would be nice not to be an afterthought's afterthought. They just need to say "Sorry, this product will not be available outside the U.S. at launch." Is it so hard?

[bfred_it]

Yes it is. From what I understand, a network will license a show to another network in another country, probably in an exclusive way. So they can't just "oh yeah you're paying us millions to distribute in your country? Let me just walk over you by streaming directly to your customers."

It doesn't work like that. These contracts are worth more than the few users that are willing to pay to stream across borders. Sad but that's TV life.

[khedoros1]

>> They just need to say "Sorry, this product will not be available outside the U.S. at launch." Is it so hard?

> Yes it is.

No, notifying that the offering won't be available outside of the U.S. wouldn't be difficult. Actually offering it outside would (and I think that's the question you were actually answering, which wasn't the question that was asked).

[mikepurvis]

This kind of thing is part of why Netflix & friends are so keen to create a bunch of original content— it's theirs, exclusively, and they don't need to deal with navigating all these preexisting commitments.

[thewhitetulip]

It was a running Joke about Netflix, "Available from anywhere across any OS [in the following regions North America, Europe etc]"

[Nullabillity]

They aren't competing against traditional cable providers, they're competing against TPB, and they're behind by a huge margin.

* Works with any player or device, vs you have to use their application

* Free vs $35/mo

* Has been available for 13+ years, vs available nowhere so far

* Available worldwide, vs some unknown region-locking but certainly US-only for the foreseeable future

* Has pretty much everything, vs "6 accounts" whatever that means

[nemothekid]

Live TV isn't competing against TBP. You can't watch sports or other live events on TBP. Why would you sign up for a live TV service, if you prefer to watch things on demand on TPB?

For any live TV offering they are competing against traditional cable providers. Netflix is already on their way on figuring out the "on-demand" content space. If you look at the blog post, 3/4s of the channels offered are either sports or live news. This simply isn't a service for on demand content.

[martinald]

You'd actually be surprised how good bittorrent live video streaming has got. I checked it out and it was pixel perfect 720p HD - absolutely fine for sports.

But yes, it's still niche, but wow it has moved on a lot. The program I used was called acestream.

[kaishiro]

This is still only true if you have the pipe. Attempting this from Melbourne and the streams still fall on their face.

[martinald]

It worked fine on 10meg/1meg ADSL2+. I think most people have access to that (at least in the UK, >95% of population).

[Aissen]

You only need a few people locally for the stream to become viable. That's the beauty of p2p.

[sergers]

Live TV competing with illegal IPTV service with reseller cost as low as 2$/month and consumer price 9-20$/month(on a small scale).

I know many people who have either cut their TV subscription, or at least scaled it down to lowest cheaper tier, since grabbing a mag254 IPTV box and finding a reseller offering upwards of 1000s of channels.

If u don't know about it, you may be content with standard livetv. But if you in the know, you are cutting at least part of your cable TV bill.

[kbhn]

> Does YouTube care about getting content to the world? Or just getting as many of their fingers in the pie as possible and abusing the current geo-restricted licensing model while they can?

I'd prefer to give YouTube the benefit of the doubt as they introduce a brand new service. They're an American company, it makes perfect sense for them to start with US customers.

[Groxx]

I imagine most people expected to use it don't get there by clicking a link on some other site immediately after it was announced - they'll probably be running ads inside YouTube, at which point they can target more accurately.

And I can't imagine they voluntarily restricted things to just the US for zero reason. Licensing around this stuff is nightmarish, and there are benefits to launching even before you're 100% global (which nothing is yet).

[wyck]

The geo-restricted licensing model is applied because Google has no choice in the matter. They have to abide by laws just like everyone else.

[shmerl]

No law forbids creators to release everywhere (i.e. no geo-restrictions). So it's not a question about why Google don't do it, but why creators don't.

[tankenmate]

The reason is that most content creators don't have the business bandwidth to do this on their own; they don't have multi-lingual business development staff, multi jurisdiction lawyers etc. So they hand this all off to content distributors, and the vast majority of these distributors are old school, they have happy and mostly profitable relationships with various resellers and TV stations around the globe. So because the content creators sell locally themselves they have automatically bifurcated the global market for their goods; local and global. It is a small step from that to regional based licensing, especially given differential pricing based on various regions ability to pay and maximising revenue.

[bestnameever]

I'm guessing most buyers, at least historically, prefer only dealing within specific regions.

Are most cable channels offered in the usa operate internationally?

[shmerl]

The way I understand it, historically geo restrictions originate from physical goods, and are usually driven by distributors, who want to reduce competition and control certain regions. I.e. in order to monopolize the market, they require those who produce some goods to restrict distribution through them only for that region, and in return they offer better pricing and assistance in that distribution. I.e. this basically makes it impossible to make global distribution rights.

This logic falls flat however in the digital world, where distributor isn't limited by region. I.e. you can open a digital store, and sell worldwide (like for example computer games stores like GOG, Steam and etc.).

So in the pure digital world, geo restrictions sound like nonsense, since they reduce reach and profits, both for creators, and distributors. My guess is, this creeps into the digital sphere, because of the influence of physical distributors, who see digital ones as a threat to their local monopolies. I suppose strong grip of some regional cable TV companies, forces creators to limit their distribution through any digital stores as well. The problem is, this approach is pretty nasty when applied in the digital space. It basically becomes xenophobic. Translating it back to physical goods, it can look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbiacSD13qk

Hopefully, the weaker regional monopolists will become, the more likely we'll have global distribution for video too.

[lotsofpulp]

I think it also has something to do with price discrimination. A seller can maximize profit if they can come closest to charging the maximum the buyers are willing to pay. So for goods where the cost to make a copy is negligible, such as media and books, the ideal pricing strategy is to sell the product at different prices to different markets, hence why you see versions of the same textbooks being sold for $10 in Asia when it's $200 in the USA.

[shmerl]

This is also problematic in a digital store. Imagine someone from USA coming to Asia to buy a book, and they refuse to sell it, or require to charge more based on the citizenship and so on. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens in digital now both with regional pricing, and geoblocking. In short, applying physical geo based logic in the digital space can lead to unethical and ugly results, because of its non physical nature.

[wyck]

Licensing for most countries is applied to broadcasters, not creators.

[shmerl]

But creators designate it. So they decide.

[kriro]

I think this will sort itself out in the near future if Google really wants to play in this area (who knows maybe this will be cancelled after a year it's Google after all). They have the machine learning power to negotiate deals with content creators that have some sort fo usage royalties. They basically get worldwide streaming rights in return for a reasonable payback that takes international viewers into account. I think the more interesting play could be targeted add injection. Imagine this service for free but with targeted adds where TV commercials would run...I'm not sure online viewers are actually willing to watch adds for TV shows but free is also free so there's that. Or maybe a hybrid or maybe virtual product placement or some sort of add system I can't think of yet.

Add to that a theoretical possibility of automatic translation and possibly even modeling the Chinese voice of actor X to sound like the original from the original broadcast data which would cut out the dubbing costs and the worldwide streaming workflow could be optimized further.

[shmerl]

The usual copyright lunacy stands in the way. Some just need to catch up with the times, and realize Internet is a global phenomenon.

[sdm]

This has always been Google's problem; it really only cares about the US. Which is not surprising given how it has historically acted as an arm of the US government. We saw this before in the iPhone vs. Android battle, it took years for Google to allow developers outside of the US (and a handful of others) in to be able to make paid apps even though Android phones where available in those markets. But when the iPhone in any country, developers from that country were immediately able to sell app in the Apple app store. This is one of the big thing that keeps us off of Google's Cloud offerings. With Google, if you're not in the US you're at best a second class citizen. With AWS you don't get that feeling at all. Even Google's founders are avowed American-supremacists, so it shouldn't come as any surprise.

[golergka]

> it has historically acted as an arm of the US government

> Google's founders are avowed American-supremacists

Pretty strong claims. Got any arguments to back them?

[sdm]

This has been pretty well documented. Just watch any interview with Larry and Sergey when they talk about the role of the US in the world -- they are very open about where they stand and that they are American-supremacists (though wouldn't use that term obviously). Look at the role Google has played pushing the US government interests in Egypt and elsewhere during the "Arab Spring". Then there is Eric Schmidt's long history of operating as a go between on behalf of the US state department. Which was well documented by wiki leaks: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

[bbcbasic]

Yeah the entertainment industry wants content to spread at the speed of a steam ship, rather than the speed of light. Fortunately: Ǝ VPN.

[romanovcode]

Yeah, and then they wonder why there is so much piracy.