[dogma1138]

You can still lock things out depending on licensing, you can’t just do it arbitrarily and unfairly.

If you do not have the right to sell outside of a member state, or the rights to sell within a specific member state or for example have restrictions on your content imposed by member state you can still restrict access.

However most of these restrictions don’t apply to games really since the publishers tend to grant full distribution rights to online platforms.

It’s only really a problem for movies and TV shows.

[user5994461]

I'd think movies and TV shows are the least affected. It's licensed by language and even if it wasn't, it's totally worthless to try to navigate an alien website to view a movie in a language you don't understand.

[dogma1138]

Movies and TV shows are the most affected because they are often secured for a specific distribution scale especially for the initial broadcast and VOD.

It's pretty common these days to have movies release sometimes at the same time as cinemas on certain premium VOD services and nearly always at least a few months before the wide scale home video release these deals not only cost a big premium but also negotiated exclusively for a specific country.

Movies are in english anyhow, even with dubbing the original language is always available subtitles are often available in multiple languages too not everyone in France speaks french, and many European countries are multilingual.

So I don't know what content is licenses by language but it sure as hell not TV and movies, for example HBO is broadcast exclusively in the UK through Sky whilst in France by OCS (Orange) and in Belgium by Proximus (BeTV) so the French dubbed version of Game of Thrones would be available for streaming exclusively during its broadcast period on (at least) two different services which cannot cross borders, Switzerland has probably it's own service I would guess that Luxembourg might be piggybacking on Belgium since BeTV is available there but I can't be arsed to check.

And if you care for the english language then it's available in nearly every EU country for it's initial broadcast run through different distributors which all have an exclusive right for the show in their own country.

[user5994461]

In France, movies cannot be released concurrently, see "chronologie des medias" literally timeline per medium. It takes up to 3 years after theatrical release to be allowed to distribute to all other mediums.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie_des_m%C3%A9dias

Movies and tv shows are ALWAYS in the local language. The fraction of population speaking English in germany/france/spain/italy/etc is incredibly small, all content is and need to be localised.

I wouldn't worry that people will start watching (English) shows from service in other countries because it won't happen.