It's not obsolete because as a content producer the global players are not always willing to pay top dollar for your content. In many cases you can get more money by selling to multiple local players with single language, geo-restricted distribution rights. And this is the tip of the iceberg because you also have different types of rights for theatrical vs streaming distribution, and your strategy could interleave them in multiple non-intuitive ways.

I understand there is a long running system in place, but from the point of view of a modern viewer/customer it all just looks like a mess.

Basically, there should be a place where you click on a button, pay some money and play the thing anywhere in the world.

Like even some possibly inflated/default price. Like this way you would get something from each viewer in geos where you have not actually sold the rights & nothing really says you can't rise or lower the price if you see demand or lack there of.

Anything else frankly looks like excuses to a normal viewer/customer in the year or 2021.

How long the system has existed has nothing to do with it. It's pure economics. If you owned content rights would you sell it for $1M when you get split up rights and get $2M for partial rights and still have upside for the remainder? If someone on the internet said "it just doesn't make sense to a viewer" would that change your mind?

No it wouldn't. The dollars don't lie. The viewers opinion is reflected in what they pay for, and that is reflected in what distributors are willing to pay. These things do change over time as the landscape shifts and new business model possibilities show up (eg. Disney+ day and date streaming releases), but it has absolutely nothing to do with your armchair notions of what makes sense to a "normal viewer". They pay or they don't, businesses are rewarded by figuring out the aggregate implications.

Selling content for different prices in different markets:

- increases revenue

- relies on being able to separate those markets effectively

It's not obsolete, because it still works.

And it's not a historical accident resulting from past business models.

Content providers with no 'analogue' history also have geographical pricing. Example: Wes Bos' excellent JavaScript courses are priced differently depending on your country.

This makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense why a content seller would want to prevent someone from a cheaper market from appearing to be from a more expensive market. If the subscriber is paying the higher price because they are pretending to be from that country, why wouldn’t they just let them? I can see trying to stop the reverse, but not that.

One classic example from microeconomics textbooks is child/adult admission tickets for cinemas. The cost to provide the service (and the constraints on capacity) are the same for both types of ticket. But children have less money than adults (in general) and it's easy to stop an adult posing as a child (by checking ID).

The Netflix example is more complicated, as there are transactions happening at two levels:

* studios are selling content to distributors in different markets

* Netflix is selling subscriptions to consumers in different markets

Also, unlike the single-event case at the top of my post, the service being provided isn't identical for all buyers. Folks in the UK don't get the same bundle of shows as folks in the US.

Even if folks in the UK pay more, that doesn't mean Netflix is OK with them watching all the shows that are available to Netflix US subscribers. Because the creators of those shows sold the UK rights to a different company (e.g. Sky TV) that was willing to pay more than Netflix.

Netflix doesn't care about this directly but, if UK customers bypass the restrictions at too large a scale, the creators/studios won't be willing to sell rights to Netflix in future. Because, by selling rights to Netflix for the US, they reduce the value of the rights they sell to Sky in UK.

> Like, it possibly made some sense back when the stuff was actually broadcast via terrestrial TV to the given area

The majority of TV viewing is still via broadcast methods.