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defrogITEM: Craig Engler of Syfy Digital explains why Syfy doesn't make its shows available online internationally, and why they don't make more shows in the US available.
The short answer is “licensing”, but Engler has a good breakdown of just what that entails, and why it limits distribution of online content. And he’s talking about Syfy here, but a lot of it applies to every other cable channel, as well as things like Hulu and (at least in principle) even music download services.
To put a fine point on it: multimedia is copyrighted under an insanely complex and multilayered royalty system that does not translate well to the borderless Internet. This is why they’ve been so slow to address it, and why everyone from Napster to YouTube is light years ahead of them.
Hoisted by my own petard,
This is dF
The short answer is “licensing”, but Engler has a good breakdown of just what that entails, and why it limits distribution of online content. And he’s talking about Syfy here, but a lot of it applies to every other cable channel, as well as things like Hulu and (at least in principle) even music download services.
To put a fine point on it: multimedia is copyrighted under an insanely complex and multilayered royalty system that does not translate well to the borderless Internet. This is why they’ve been so slow to address it, and why everyone from Napster to YouTube is light years ahead of them.
Hoisted by my own petard,
This is dF
