Delayed availability also bolsters piracy. In the age of the internet, people don’t want to watch foreign shows weeks or months after they’ve aired in their country of origin, but within mere hours of original airing so they can ride the global wave of discussion after each episode.
A six month delay for example will completely miss the bulk of the show’s online relevance and even a week is enough to seriously dampen enthusiasm in the region. This isn’t the 90s or prior decades where viewers are entirely reliant on local licensees to know what’s available.
Studios, distributors, and streaming services are seriously shooting themselves in the foot by not pulling all stops to make sure all shows are simultaneously available worldwide.
Piracy also solves the opposite problem of "old" movies and TV shows disappearing from streaming services. Especially since many things are exclusive to streaming platforms with no physical release, after they're removed from a streaming service, piracy is the only way to view such stuff.
In addition, piracy ensures that the "original" version -- whether it was released on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming platform -- is "always" there (as long as someone is seeding). These days streaming services take down 50-year-old content because of racial prototypes or other politically incorrectly content given what (some) people believe in 2024, edit them or never put them on the shelve again. If all they do is to add "content advisory", consider yourself lucky.
This is one of the most stupid things that have happened.
I recently watched a 90s show that, because of the context and the country it was made, they used music with no regard for licensing issues. Essentially, no one would have expected or foreseen that it could run into legal issues at any point.
However, when they put it on netflix they changed the soundtrack for that reason.
Some kind soul uploaded the original versions to youtube.
There’s also cases where by far and away the best version of a given piece of media is the recording of an HDTV broadcast from somewhere in southeast Asia or something because the rightsholders never bothered to produce a physical release in anything better than VHS or badly mastered DVD.
Piracy works around negligence on the part of publishers like this.
A six month delay for example will completely miss the bulk of the show’s online relevance and even a week is enough to seriously dampen enthusiasm in the region. This isn’t the 90s or prior decades where viewers are entirely reliant on local licensees to know what’s available.
Studios, distributors, and streaming services are seriously shooting themselves in the foot by not pulling all stops to make sure all shows are simultaneously available worldwide.