[xsmasher]

"Spoilers" or inconvenience don't give you a right to the content either.

The studio has to weigh the benefits of a worldwide launch (possibly reduced piracy?) against the benefits of a staggered launch (ability to pay for and schedule proper promotion, localization, and advertising in each market.) Sometimes the studio makes the wrong choice, ether the wrong economic one or the one you don't like, but that's their prerogative.

Meta: I'm surprised be the amount of piracy entitlement on HN, which I expect has more content creators than the average net audience.

[babebridou]

When a particular product hits home, people feel robbed for not being able to buy it on the spot for any reason, especially when shipping and manufacturing costs are close to zero. Indeed, it really is the other way around, and it will never be otherwise, but it doesn't change the fact that some of your paying customers will be dissatisfied by your service to the point that they will take action to bypass your own faulty distribution channel, and they will even pay to be able to do that.

Heck, let's drop the masks, the majority of your paying customers even bought their very first computer just to be able to do that over the past decade.

I'm not advocating piracy, I'm explaining why it exists in the first place. When the pirated product is available immediately instead of months/years later, and with better features than the legit one, it's foolish to expect even paying fans not to pirate things nor look into piracy as a distribution channel. This is a challenge that content distributors need to deal with, one way or another.

Saying that people shouldn't pirate digital goods because it's illegal is all nice and well, but is this even enforceable? It's my own humble belief that it's not, not with the current state of the art, and that yelling at piracy is like yelling at windmills. Just deal with it and improve your product distribution in every possible way so that piracy is not exactly a better option.

It works, Apple proved it, Steam proved it.

[timknauf]

I'm surprised at the piracy entitlement too, and as a content creator, I don't condone it myself. But please understand that this kind of situation - new Arrested Development only available to US citizens - is incredibly frustrating for the rest of us precisely because we, as HNers, know there's zero technical reason why we couldn't be paying for and watching Netflix from anywhere in the internet connected world.