[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.