// what is the reason for region locking media?

Question

Sorry if I’m using incorrect terminology.

Killing Eve is region locked to GB apparently and I vaguely remember El Orfanato being only available in Spain for a short while, but it’s seemingly not locked there anymore.

What is the reason for this? Isn’t it better and more profitable to not region lock?

In: 2

Answer 1

At a surface level, it’s simply licencing agreements. Presuming you’re talking about streaming video services, content is locked to specific regions because the company the platform licences it from has different licencing agreements in different countries, and requires the streaming platform to implement region locking to enforce those requirements.

At a deeper level, there are multiple reasons why a content owner requires regional licencing.

**Pricing.** Different countries have different buying power. What the average American can afford with a week’s wages is very different to what the average Brazilian can afford, even after currency conversion. So regional pricing is used to make things fair. But with modern global logistics and digital distribution, consumers from countries with higher buying power are able to take unfair advantage of prices in regions with lower buying power; region locks prevent that.

**Laws.** Different countries have different laws and regulations for doing business in that country. In some regions, certain content is banned, restricted (affected sales), and/or must meet certain requirements to be sold, so you must prevent those places accessing the version of content that doesn’t comply. In some regions, a foreign entity is required to work with a local partner for distribution, or you don’t get to do business in that region. Sometimes, local laws are so complicated that it’s not practical even for a major corporation to distribute content themselves, so they create distribution or publishing agreements with other companies.

There’s other good reasons like localization, logistics, piracy, PAL vs NTSC standards etc that other people have answered so I won’t repeat what they’ve said.