The DVD region code system: Standardizing home video’s disjunctive global flows

Looking (back?) at the DVD

Why revisit the DVD as a topic of study at a moment when, to many, the technology seems increasingly obsolete or residual? For one, this article outlines how the region code helped institutionalize within digital home entertainment industries a conceptualization of the globe as a divisible series of regional markets – one that continues to inform digital media on an international level. We can see it in recent discourse about regional restrictions in latter-generation video game consoles like Nintendo’s Wii U and the debates over geo-blocked streaming video platforms like Hulu and the BBC’s iPlayer (George, 2013; Klosowski, 2012). By focusing on the incubation of these developments within public and industrial discourses of digital and ‘new’ media beginning in the mid 1990s, I take the DVD region code as a key origin point of the last two decades’ debates over regional control and digital media technology.

Additionally, despite the pronouncements of the death of the DVD at the hands of Blu-ray and online streaming, the technology is very much alive even if sales are not currently at their peak. A 2014 Gallup poll asking Americans about the digital devices they own shows that DVD and Blu-ray players remain the most widely owned – more so than cable television, laptops, and smartphones (Dugan 2014). As Benzon (2013: 89) argues, the DVD has maintained a complicated and contradictory global life marked by the ‘complex and conflicted timeline of technological change shaped by interdependence among innovation, obsolescence, residuality, reproduction, and reuse’. Given this, the suggestion that DVD will be (or has been) wholly replaced by Blu-ray and streaming video carries classist and western-focused assumptions.

DVD remains an important cultural artifact not merely because it still exists, but also because it continues to impact audiences’ experiences of films or television programs. DVDs are not simply functional delivery systems for messages or content, but art and entertainment devices that, in their promises for high-fidelity sound and image, bonus features and collectible packaging, offer aesthetic experiences to viewers. Given this, the DVD is far from a mere ancillary product; it can be constitutive of a film or television program’s textuality in a variety of ways (see Brookey and Westerfelhaus, 2002; Gray, 2010; Klinger, 2006; Kompare, 2006; Tryon, 2009). The region code’s importance becomes evident, here, when one notes that DVDs for the same film are not identical across regions. They differ textually and paratextually, as a DVD from, say, region one will likely contain different bonus features, commentaries, available languages, and audiovisual specifications than a DVD from region five. Indeed, one trade report refers to region one (i.e. American and Canadian) DVDs as the most ‘desirable’ in the world (Regional code circumvention …, 1998), and another quotes European DVD Lab CEO Michael Tucker explaining that region one DVDs would be preferable because of extra features and superior audiovisual quality (Andrews, 1999).

In making a case for the importance of both DVDs and the DVD region code, I do not argue that the region code system necessarily worked to wholly shape the flow of home video around the world. Indeed, methods of circumventing technological regulation almost always immediately follow its development, and a dominant narrative produced by media industries, technology manufacturers, and users throughout the history of the DVD was that region codes simply did not work. Noting the prevalence of teenagers hacking DVD encryption and engaging in peer-to-peer file sharing, Bordwell (2012: 54) indicates that such modes of circumvention are ‘literally child’s play’. Several scholars have shown that informal or semi-formal economies of media distribution, which exist outside and at times in direct conflict with state-recognized and sanctioned media economies that abide by forms of regulation like the region code, are widespread around the world (Gray, 2011; Lobato, 2012; Mattelart, 2009; Miller, 2012; Starosielski, 2010). The ability to surpass technological regulation relatively easily has contributed to a global video and DVD environment that O’Regan (1991) and McDonald (2007) have characterized as ‘porous’. So, to argue that the DVD region code completely served its function would be to adopt a view that is both technologically determinist and Hollywood-centric.

Still, if the region code system did not function as ideally as Hollywood studios had hoped, it proliferated and popularized a divisional media-industrial and technical logic that remains in place today. Region codes embedded a hierarchy of geocultural difference on the global media landscape by aligning certain territories together and mapping both a numerical ranking and a set of cultural and economic meanings onto these groupings. In doing so, region codes are characteristic of what Silverstone (2006: 19) called media’s ‘boundary work’, which refers to the multitude of ways media systems generate and sustain lines of geographic, political, and cultural difference and sameness. Morley (2006: 239) points to the role of DVD region codes in this boundary work, noting that they serve to remind us that new media technologies ‘not only help to transcend boundaries in any simple sense, but also continuously recreate them’. In its capacity to at least partially shape material geographic flows of media around the world and its operation as a discursive landscape on which articulations among digital technologies, home video, and geocultural difference take place, the DVD region code scheme shows that media’s difference-inscribing boundary work can operate at the level of technological regulation and the discourses that envelop those moments of regulation. If, as Sterne (2006: 826) argues, technologies serve as cultural artifacts that embed the social and material conditions of their creation within their technological composition, the history of the DVD region code’s emergence can reveal much about the discourses, disputes, and discussions that attended media’s globalization and digitization over the past two decades.

Regional management, technological control, and global markets

So, what are region codes and how do they work? In order to ensure that DVDs from one region do not play on players from a different region, the DVD’s technical specifications, as developed and outlined by an organization of consumer electronics companies called the DVD Consortium (now called the DVD Forum), include a flag coded on the disc. A DVD player from the same region as the disc must be able to read this flag before it will play the DVD. This Regional Playback Control (RPC) mechanism is part of the DVD’s Content Scramble System (CSS), the anti-copying technological architecture developed by Matsushita and Toshiba and endorsed by the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, which was comprised of representatives from the DVD Consortium and companies from the computing, consumer electronics, and entertainment industries (Cole, 1996: 20; Gillespie, 2007: 170). The CSS license is now controlled and licensed by a California non-profit corporation called the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA). While use of the region code system is technically voluntary for DVD hardware and software manufacturers (in that it is not a legally binding system but only part of the CSS license), major studios will generally not license their properties to manufacturers that do not abide by it (Taylor et al., 2006: 5–20). Thus, it becomes a necessary mechanism for distributors and manufacturers that want access to Hollywood product.

The DVD Forum’s specifications require eight regions, six of which correspond to different geographic territories around the world. The regions, as listed in Taylor et al.’s (2006) comprehensive handbook DVD Demystified, are as follows:

Region six is the only territory that includes just one country, China, for a number of reasons. For one, given the country’s censorship practices, functioning as its own region allows China to more easily control and regulate the content of their DVDs. Additionally, due to the informal economies that comprise part of the Chinese DVD market (see Wang, 2003), what the Hollywood studios and other intellectual property industries would characterize as piracy, maintaining China as its own region allows the global DVD industries to more easily control the country as a DVD market and ensure that pirated region six DVDs do not compete in other markets (Yu, 2012: 214). Incidentally, the latter issues also indicate why Southeast Asia, also home to numerous informal DVD economies, represents its own region (Yu, 2012: 215).

Key to understanding the region code is that it is a mechanism intentionally and artificially installed in the technology. In other words, there is nothing inherent in the DVD as a compression and transmission technology that requires the installation and perpetuation of the region code system. As Sterne (2012: 8) points out, because technological protocols and specifications ‘are not publicly discussed or even apparent to end-users, they often take on a sheen of ontology when they are more precisely the product of contingency.’ The development of the region code out of a series of contingent moments in the mid 1990s emphasizes how media technologies reflect certain political and cultural ideas. As a result, this article draws inspiration from scholarship that investigates the ways technologies come to have cultural meaning, particularly in the context of the global media industries. As Silverstone and Mansell (1996: 213) note, communication technologies carry political meanings both due to the institutions in which they were created as well as ‘within the technology itself, as software products and information networks both prescribe and proscribe, configuring suppliers and users, containing and constraining behavior, and embodying in their algorithms and their gateways both the normative and the seductive’.

One way global media corporations have facilitated the development of these technologies toward their own goals is to work with governments and transnational regulatory bodies to regulate their products. As many scholars have shown, the affordances and properties of digital technologies make it much easier for industries and regulators to control technologies themselves by manipulating code and technological standards through intellectual property and copyright law (Gillespie, 2007; Lessig, 2004, 2006; Vaidhyanathan, 2003). The suggestion that technologies can be regulated through code or technological architecture as much as traditional legislation is one of Lessig’s (2004, 2006) enduring contributions. Building on this idea, Gillespie (2007: 101–2) notes that technologies become regulated through a ‘regime of alignment’ that includes not only the technological constraints of digital rights management (DRM), but also legal, political, and industrial measures to make DRM systems mandatory for users and industries alike. Over the past two decades, the fear of digital piracy has given Hollywood a pretext to work with regulators to convince the manufacturers of technology to build digital distribution and exhibition devices in ways that restrict unlicensed, and thus unacceptable, forms of media use (Barlow, 2005: 150; Lessig, 2006: 170).

While region codes fit into this regulatory environment, they are not mere by-products of stringent copyright laws; they also have a purely profit-driven function. The region code system was developed primarily so movie studios (and particularly Hollywood) could preserve their global market power and maintain some semblance of control over the distribution of home video products around the world. Gillespie (2007: 19) notes that the DVD region coding system allows major media industries to ‘slice up the global market, engage in price discrimination, stagger releases, and even ignore markets they do not see as lucrative’. In the case of region codes, this occurred at a moment when global markets were becoming more important to the studios and, in particular, Hollywood’s home video operations (Balio, 1998: 58).

Within this broader context of Hollywood’s global market power, region codes were developed in order to preserve the studios’ scheduled theatrical and home video release windows (Hu, 2006). At the time of DVD’s development, Hollywood studios and formal film distribution networks operated almost exclusively under a ‘tiered’ form of windowing, where theaters in certain markets would run a film before distributors released it in other markets (e.g. second-run theaters, theaters in different regions of the world, home video) (Wasser, 2001). Since media companies exploit different territorial markets in different ways, adjusting prices, release schedules, and technologies of delivery in order to maximize profits, DVD region codes were meant to allow them to adjust home video release dates and pricing within different markets. At the time of DVD’s emergence, Hollywood often put a film out on video in the US before giving it a theatrical debut overseas, and region codes tried to ensure that DVDs of a film from one market did not enter another market before or during its theatrical release. Furthermore, since different companies own home video distribution rights to a filmed property in different territories, region codes helped these companies keep control over distribution to their respective markets. All in all, region codes would ideally enable market segmentation and price discrimination in the media industries, wherein ‘it must be possible for the seller to separate markets and keep them separate’ (Hoskins et al., 1997: 69; see also Dunt et al., 2002: 36–9). Region codes thus help set conditions for the industrial maximization of content value that Ulin (2000: 5) refers to as ‘Ulin’s Rule’, wherein ‘content value is optimized by exploiting the factors of time, repeat consumption (platforms), exclusivity, and differential pricing’.

As a technology of media distribution, the DVD region code is as much a cultural system as it is a form of technological regulation. Media scholars have increasingly emphasized that distribution both informs and is informed by culture and cultural politics at various levels (Havens, 2006; Himpele, 1996; Lobato, 2012; Perren, 2013). Lobato (2012: 15) in particular reminds us that media distribution inscribes cultural difference by fragmenting audiences and transmitting ‘values, competencies, and ideology’ via texts. Looking more locally, Himpele (1996: 60) sees film distribution as a site of ‘difference-distributing sets of relations’ in how it demarcates lines of social and cultural difference. The region code reflects this understanding of distribution because its contours carve out such lines by differentiating geocultural territories as spaces for art and entertainment. Some scholars who have written on region codes have been attuned to such issues. Ďurovičová (2009) suggests that while DVD region codes are geopolitical arrangements, they have far-reaching cultural implications because of how they shape the language tracks made available on certain regionally coded DVDs. Hu (2006) notes that region codes enable media industries to carve up global markets and thus devalue certain territories, facilitate state censorship by allowing states to release different versions of the same film in different territories, and discriminate against immigrants and diaspora groups, since many films from one’s home country will not be released outside their original region. Stone (2007) analyzes the impact of new screen technologies on European cinema through the conceptual frame of referring to Europe as ‘Region 2’, invoking Europe’s designation in the DVD region coding scheme.

We can also see traces of region codes’ cultural significance in journalistic and trade discourse, which occasionally articulates cultural specificities, tropes, and stereotypes to differently coded DVDs. A DVD player review in Popular Electronics warns, ‘If someone from Region 2 (Europe and Japan) tries to play a DVD obtained from Region 1, it’s not supposed to run in his or her indigenous player. The same principle applies if you pick up some DVDs while on vacation in Mexico (Region 4) that seem to be a steal at the currency exchange rate’ (Booth, 1999, my emphasis). In 1999, Disney released a number of animated films on discs encoded in both region one and region four, meant for ‘both early adopters who snapped up Zone 1 players designed for North America and mainstream Mexican consumers who have begun buying Zone 4 machines’ (Disney DVDs…, 1999). This not only invokes the ‘early adopter’ to mean the privileged few that have access to prime (i.e. American) product, the trade report also noted that such releases would ‘boast dual citizenship of sorts’, aligning ideas of cultural belonging with technology. Similarly, a 1996 Variety report on the inter-industry disputes over the implementation of the region code system during that year’s DVD Forum meeting in Brussels includes an illustration where individuals representing cultural stereotypes plant flags on a globe in order to claim their territory on the divisible global film and television landscape (Stalter and Homer, 1996). ¹ The region code, and its ability to articulate these borders of discrimination and belonging within international media environments, grew out of a series of debates primarily among media companies and consumer electronics manufacturers. Throughout this process, Hollywood used existing cultural and economic differences between geocultural global regions as opportunities to maintain previously held global distribution arrangements.

Developing the region code

While the DVD eventually transformed into an industry standard, its development was anything but predetermined. As the entertainment and computing industries rushed to develop an optical, disc-based video format during a time when media corporations consolidated and globalized their operations in order to achieve greater economies of scale and control (Dai, 2000; Herman and McChesney, 1997), the negotiations that took place due to various media-industrial alignments resulted in a long development of the technology well before it was made widely available to the public (see Dai, 2000; McDonald, 2007; Sebok, 2007; Taylor et al., 2006; Wasser, 2008). Region codes in particular emerged out of a slow process that saw a series of debates among global entertainment content industries (and Hollywood in particular), the computing industries, and consumer electronics manufacturers – the three broad industries all interested in preserving their stake in what would become a globally popular, multi-use content delivery system (Sebok, 2007). As Büthe and Mattli (2011: 33–4) suggest, ‘since the choice of a seemingly technical standard can “lock in” commercial or political advantages for a long time to come, the ensuing global standards “battles” tend to be fierce’.

The possibility of DVD regional management (at least in public discourse) dates back to 1995, the same year Hollywood backed the DVD as its preferred format. A March 1996 trade report indicated that by that point, the idea for region codes had been ‘floating around for months’ and that a consortium of Hollywood studios had met the previous year to include region coding on their ‘wish list of DVD features’ (DVD borders sought …, 1996). Said ‘wish list’ signaled the extent to which the Hollywood studios directed the development of the technology, as a later trade report suggests that it was a ‘precondition studios demanded before issuing movies on DVD’ (Regional code circumvention …, 1998). As the 1996 report noted, ‘it is expected that regional borders would be defined primarily by Hollywood’s theatrical and home video release patterns and by the TV standard in use in the respective countries [PAL AND NTSC]’ (DVD borders sought …, 1996). The motivation to adopt a globally divergent technical standard lay purely with the studios so they could maintain release schedules, and the only incentive for hardware and software manufacturers to adopt the system was to gain access to Hollywood product. Yu (2012: 193) explains, ‘by holding back content … the studios were able to obtain the needed leverage to convince technology developers to protect media content by incorporating technological measures into their devices’. At the same time, manufacturers and trade press expressed their doubts, with Video Business suggesting that while DVD was ‘meant to be the first truly global playback device … the studios’ insistence on regional coding will make a DVD player no more universal than a conventional VCR’ (Apar, 1996). Nevertheless, at the studios’ insistence, the companies began to negotiate a regional control system. For hardware and software manufacturers, not only would installing region codes add extra steps in the design and manufacturing processes, it would also mean that products meant for one market could not be rerouted to another to fulfill demand (Homer, 1996). Even after region codes were an established technology, software manufacturers expressed their belief that region coding would be short-lived and that it was never ‘backed fully by hardware makers or even some studios’ (Regional code circumvention …, 1998).

Given these tensions, the debates over region coding and other intellectual property-protection initiatives further delayed the release of the DVD to late 1996 and early 1997. By July 1996, MGM/UA Home Entertainment president Richard Cohen suggested presciently that if copy protection issues and region codes were not hammered out soon, a fall launch for the format would be ‘dicey’ (Cohen admits …, 1996). The September 1996 DVD Forum conference in Brussels offered several high-profile debates on region codes, and reports noted that agreements on the system were either ‘non-existent or non-committal’ at the event (Parker, 1996: 11). At the conference, DVD manufacturers objected to the Hollywood studios’ attempts to force them to install region codes, arguing that it would put an undue burden on manufacturers who held no vested interest in the system beyond its ability to help facilitate agreements with content providers (Stalter and Homer, 1996: 80). Manufacturers also indicated during that summit that consumers in territories like Russia, China, and South America tended to buy their VCRs from other countries and wondered how these consumers would cope in a more disjunctive digital media environment. Soon after, however, the region code system’s technological specifications and geographic contours were finalized, and in late September, manufacturers agreed in principle on a system that would divide the world into six geographical regions (Another hurdle cleared …, 1996). By January 1997, Sony and Warner Bros. announced that DVDs would be available in the US by April (Stalter, 1997: 150).

So, how did these various parties decide which territories went into which regions? A Consumer Electronics piece on region codes details a 1996 memo from the co-chair of the DVD Consortium (a Toshiba executive) to the Hollywood studios that outlined a combination of cultural, economic, and regulatory rationales behind each region. The memo says that Mexico was split from region one and included in region four in part to ‘harmonize’ Mexico as a distribution window with the rest of Latin America (Europe probes …, 2001). This split reflects the media-industrial practice of building geocultural and geolinguistic regional markets out of different territories perceived as having some commonalities (e.g. language, ethnicity, economic status, and geographical location) (Chalaby, 2005; Straubhaar, 2007). As the logic goes, Canada and the United States have certain similarities, and Mexico’s similarities lie more readily with Latin America. Similarly, given the ways differently coded DVDs have been used to distribute DVDs with different languages to a variety of locations around the world, the inclusion of Mexico with Latin America points to the role of language in shaping the world’s home video markets.

The memo indicated another reason Mexico was included in a separate region from the US and Canada: fears of parallel imports. Since Mexican DVD prices would be lower than those in the US, the studios placed Mexico in region four in order to forestall the sale of DVDs meant for Mexico in the United States (Europe probes …, 2001). Often, this attempt to close off parallel imports relied on linguistic commonalities to control the regional placement of certain nations. For example, the memo also points out that Japan and Korea were placed in region two and Australia placed in region four in order to help control the possibility of parallel importation of region one DVDs in those territories due to the number of English-speaking consumers in them. In other words, since language differences could not as easily be used as a natural barrier against parallel import, the territories were placed in their own region codes. Similarly, due to the aforementioned studio fears of piracy in China, that country was placed into its own region, six. Some territories did not rank highly enough as markets to be considered even at this level, and a broad swath of what the memo refers to as ‘underdeveloped theatrical markets’ such as South Asia, much of Africa (except for South Africa and Egypt – both region two), and Russia were all placed together in region five (Europe probes …, 2001). Even simply observing the numerical system, it is not hard to see the hierarchy at play here. Indeed, this hierarchy upset consumer rights advocates and local distributors in Australia and New Zealand, who argued that region four, where they were placed, was too ‘small, too poor, and too linguistically diverse’ to make it a viable major media market, suggesting some desire to operate at a more elevated position (Borrowman, 1997).

Ultimately, despite the fact that region codes were often considered ineffectual, as discussed below, the mechanism still operates in DVD hardware and software to this day. While the newer Blu-ray format has loosened the guidelines of Regional Playback Control somewhat, the mechanism was maintained for the same reasons as DVD region codes: the preservation of international release dates. Where DVD split the world into six regions, Blu-ray discs are coded for three different regions. Furthermore, the Blu-ray region code system is more lenient toward distributors and manufacturers, as it is a voluntary system. In other words, it is not necessarily a prerequisite for the studios licensing their content to home video distributors. That the region code system remains in place, but with a few concessions, indicates an ongoing tension between global fluidity and intellectual property control.

Standardizing international home video culture

As this history shows, the development of region codes offers a story of how standard-setting can impact global entertainment culture. To clarify, the region code is not a technical standard in the same sense as a compression or container format like the MP3, JPEG, or AVI, because it is neither a file format nor an essential component of DVD playback. Rather, it is part of an encryption standard (i.e. CSS) that is not legally or technologically mandatory but is a prerequisite for wide distribution within the world’s dominant formal DVD economies. More precisely, then, region codes might be considered an example of attempted standardization rather than a technical standard per se. Still, as a proprietary technological system that came about as the result of an agreement among various private stakeholders, region codes were meant to standardize not only the functions of the DVD technology but also the cultural and economic geographies of home video distribution.

While standard-setting is a media-industrial operation meant in part to shore up control over efficient modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, Sterne (2012) and Abbate (1999) have noted that technological standards are not simply culturally and politically neutral. In fact, they reflect a variety of contextual and conjunctural assumptions and ideologies that helped guide the development of the technology. Writing of the recent tussles over digital television (DTV) standardization around the world, Leiva (2011: 104) argues that for companies and states, the ability to direct global standards represents a ‘race to the top’, wherein such organizations attempt to ‘conquer the world’ by pressuring the rest of the globe to adopt their preferred standard. The major Hollywood studios develop new technologies and set standards for them by ‘cooperating with each other to mutual benefit, while they set up barriers to entry that exclude outsiders’ (Bordwell, 2012: 70). Often, as in the case of DVD region codes, this ‘mutual benefit’ manifests as attempts to maintain as much control over the monetization of content through distribution and exhibition as possible and, in turn, achieve greater economies of scale (Morley and Robins, 1995). As these economies of scale expand ever outward, the role of standards in facilitating a controlled flow has become evident. By easing transnational distribution (at least among the industries and bodies that nominally control that distribution), international standards that govern media technologies have done much to shape media globalization (Sterne, 2012: 24).

As a system created by a handful of multinational media companies, the region code’s standardization and development took place in an international business environment characterized by ‘networking involving a large number of companies, in the name of promoting global standardization’ (Dai, 2000: 222). Globalization and privatization during the 1990s saw increased initiatives by multinational corporations across a number of industries to regulate their own operations through a broad process of ‘global governance’, or ‘mechanisms to reach collective decisions about transnational problems with or without government participation’ (Haufler, 2001: 107). DVD region codes similarly represent an instance where multiple industries aligned to adopt a nominally voluntary but practically requisite technological standard guided by the interests of the most powerful players within these alignments. Writing about the DVD specifically, Dai (2000: 222) calls global governance ‘a process of technological and market agenda-setting via allied or networked businesses in a global context’. The deregulatory environment within which this sort of global governance occurred saw a demonstrable shift in power from national, public regulators to multinational, private entities regulating the internet and other forms of digital media (Brousseau et al., 2012: 34; Mody et al., 2006; Mueller, 2010: 4–5). In the context of audiovisual technologies, Sterne (2012: 135) points out that while such standards were often presented through the rhetoric of a free market, ‘it might be better to say that standards were simply managed by industrial interests, since oligopolistic market conditions existed just as often as free market conditions’.

While DVD region codes were developed in this context of private industry, and were thus not technically a legally binding system for studios and manufacturers, the studios began to invoke intellectual property law at home and abroad in order to keep users from hacking regional management systems – part of global Hollywood’s broader practice of using the state and intellectual property law to ease global expansion (Miller et al., 2005: 216; Wasko, 1994). For one, the studios often invoked the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to suggest that hacking and circumventing region codes was illegal. Additionally, in 1998, Warner Home Video president Warren Lieberfarb reminded users that the distribution of region one discs in the UK infringed on local copyright laws that grant a film’s distributor the rights to ‘prevent transshipments of merchandise’ (Regional code circumvention …, 1998). In 1999, Pathe, the European theatrical distributor of The Blair Witch Project, hired a firm to monitor the sale of region one discs of the film to consumers in Europe, suggesting that the parallel import of these discs into Europe violated international copyright regulations by impinging on Pathe’s rights as distributor of that intellectual property (Regional-code spat …, 1999).

Indeed, although industries were creating these standards with little direct input from the state, they did so at a time when transnational governance bodies put forward reports on standards and trade that helped set the conditions for industries to self-regulate. For instance, in 1996, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a consortium on world trade and economic growth comprising 34 countries across North America, Europe, East Asia, and Oceania, released a report on best practices for the global standardization of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). The report put forward a list of recommendations suggesting that ICT standardization should be ‘market-driven’, shaped by ‘industry-led consortia, fora, and other “informal” bodies’, balance the recognition of intellectual property rights and a desire for fair competition, limit government intervention, and ‘promote the adoption of international standards in preference to national standards’ (OECD, 1996). In the context of the promotion of such forms of governance, DVD region codes represented a moment of attempted standardization guided by a combination of oligopolistic Hollywood studios and the eventual agreement of consumer electronics manufacturers.

In spite of these attempts at top-down control, region codes functioned only partially to minimize parallel imports and retain studios’ distribution arrangements. Throughout (and well after) the development of the region code, a pressing issue for the studios was that the technology was proving somewhat ineffective in stalling parallel imports and preserving theatrical windows overseas. Even during their earliest years, the complaint that DVD region codes were not fulfilling their goals grew common. A Variety piece from 1999 on digital distribution windows provides a somewhat implicit indictment of non-US users: ‘Despite coding on DVDs that supposedly renders them unplayable outside a specific region, once a movie appears on disc in the U.S., it quickly makes its way to other territories where it’s easy to get around the encryption’ (Sweeting, 1999: 12). A Billboard article from November of 2000 stated even more bluntly in a headline: ‘DVD regional coding not working’ (Andrews, 2000: 99).

Given this dysfunction, entertainment industries introduced various mechanisms in 1999 and 2000 to make region coding more stringent. To further protect DVD players, the major studios pushed for the development of a stronger form of DVD region code called Region Code Enhancement (RCE). Region one DVDs equipped with RCE would be unplayable in region-free players. In a move that proved symbolic, given the DVD region code system’s tendency to privilege the US as the world’s most powerful media market, the first DVD to roll out this new ‘enhanced’ form of regional copy protection was Columbia Tristar Home Video’s The Patriot (Sweeting, 2000: 16). However, even RCE was initially unable to keep region one DVDs from playing on region-free players (Problems found …, 2000; RCE fails …, 2000). In 2003, video retailer Blockbuster argued that not only did region codes fail to stall international grey markets, but in fact pirates were exploiting the extra time between international release windows shored up by region codes in order to put their own product out ahead of official releases (Sweeting, 2003). As these issues indicate, while the region code aimed to control global home video distribution as much as possible, its practical impacts proved to be diverse and unpredictable.

Conclusion

In the end, the commercial and political advantages afforded to Hollywood throughout this battle amounted to the ability to maintain at least partial control of the world as a series of differentiated distributional spaces. As a result, region codes indicate how the synthesis of technical standards, media distribution arrangements, and private governance of new media engender claims by different private interests about the world’s cultural and economic characteristics. At the same time, in spite of the region code’s emergence in this context of top-down tussles over standardization and control, the technology’s legacy is as much cultural and spatial as it is economic and technological. As a series of moments where lines of geocultural difference were marked within the technology itself, the history of the region code allows us to see with particular clarity how these interests implemented the structural elements of media’s cultural boundary work.