Comment by PeterStuer 13 hours ago
“Take your streaming subscriptions with you: watch and listen anywhere in the EU.”
In other words, allow publishers to region lock digital content deals to a specific EU country, even though (in theory) the EU is "Single Market for goods and services".
There are good EU regulations. There are also some very bad onces.
If I travel anywhere in Europe, my Prime account is still locked to the same useless crappy Belgium catalogue because "licenses"
Meawhile the TV sites are region locked, so you can't watch Belgian TV from Spain because "licenses".
So much for the single common market.
How does the first entail the second?
The way I read the text of the law, it acknowledges that there are regional locking inside the EU, and you should be allowed to bring your subscriptions with you as you travel the EU.
Sounds like you would want the law to be a different law, enforcing the EU to be a single market for all intellectual property and subscriptions. I think that sounds like a good idea, but it's a different law.
Except that's not how it works. (So far) Each one of my subscriptions just show me content of the local country.
So say Netflix, it's say French Netflix, when I'm in France and so on. Same with Spotify.
The law is just setup so services can't block you from using your subscription in another country. Which honestly I don't think was a problem in the first place.
Now if there was a law to make these damn things give you all the language and subtitle options.... I'd be all for that.
Because the big problem (again Netflix is a good example) is when travelling, is for the most part subtitles are only in usually two languages. The native language of the country, and English.
On vacation and want to watch something in another language? Ok now you need a third language (English) in order to watch it.
Even though Netflix has the subtitles in every language.