Microsoft
Vongo to Canada: get lost (updated)
Vongo, the newly-announced downloadable video service from Starz Entertainment (a unit of John Malone’s Liberty Media), sounds like a pretty cool idea — it would let you download Hollywood movies, concerts, TV shows and other content to various devices, including portable video players (although maybe not iPods, according to the New York Times).
There’s just one problem — at least for someone like me, who happens to live in the Great White North (i.e., Canada). Vongo is restricted to U.S. residents. Here’s what I got when I went to the webpage: “You need to be in the United States to view this site.” On a somewhat redundant note, under the heading of Minimum System Requirements, the only requirement is that you be “located in the U.S.”
I know there are probably all kinds of perfectly reasonable legal requirements for that kind of thing, but I have to confess that it still pisses me off — or maybe it’s just the suggestion that living anywhere other than the U.S. constitutes a “geographic failure.”
Update:
As you can see if you read the comments, someone from Starz responded to this post within about an hour of it going up, which I have to say is pretty good, considering I don’t get a lot of traffic. Alesya Holick said the U.S.-only requirement is necessary because the company only has the U.S. distribution rights for the content it will be distributing (which is pretty much what I figured), and that Starz would change the description on the website to make that more clear — and remove that nasty “geographic failure” part.
Nice to see a company responding so quickly to a post by a puny little Canadian blogger like me.
Update 2:
Rafat over at PaidContent notes that the Vongo terms of service carry a number of restrictions — which makes Thomas Hawk wonder why anyone would want to use it instead of just recording or torrenting whatever they want to watch. A fair point.
Update 3:
As the latest comment on this item shows, Vongo hasn’t changed the page that first comes up when you hit the site, so top marks for quick response to my blog, but subtract all those and more for not doing anything about it.
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I LOVE IT! What a perfect, succint, profoundly American "Up Yours". And what a great example of why US businesses operating internationally via remote control from the States tend to fail so dismally. Travelocity is still on my Christmas card list for that one...
I totally get the clearances or licensing issue (which this must be), but MAN. And Maffei should know better too, to boot. Tsk tsk.
But good on Liberty's PR department / agency for tracking this and posting. Now, just get the copy fixed, kids. Pronto. Serves you right for writing a spec that left the developers to come up with something themselves :-)
Thanks for sharing, Mathew!
- Stuart
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problem, and I know there's probably not a lot that Starz can do about it
-- I guess it was the "geographic failure" part that really got to
me... we Canadians are sensitive :-)
And Stuart, I guess it's one thumb up and one thumb down for Starz -- a
thumb down for being U.S.-centric, but a thumb up for responding so
quickly to a little blogger like me.
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- Stuart
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What an incredibly AMERICAN thing to do. No wonder everyone, and I mean everyone worldwide, hates them.
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After viewing a commercial about this service, I though, yeah baby!
If I had a library of unlimited content at my disposal, I’d never leave the house again ;-)
So with that thought in mind, I tap out Vongo’s site, and to my amazement, they give me the geographic heave ho. Sheash guys have a heart, eh!
But seriously I’m getting used to this, if you go to showtime’s web site for new show info, you get the same treatment. Fortunately, you can use an anonymous surf client to get past their Canuck scanner, and all their info is at your fingertips :-)
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