A certain mad scientist and his beautiful assistant introduced us, once upon a time, to Babylon 5. Now, Carrie and I would like to own it. (Someday, anyway.)
Season one @ Amazon.com is $85. Season one @ Amazon.co.uk costs 35 GBP.
If I do a currency conversion (based on the value of the pound and dollar, today), I discover that 35 GBP is around $55. Since both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk will offer me free shipping options, it is $30 cheaper (per season, and there are 5 seasons in all!) to purchase the DVDs in the UK.
Region encoding is simply a way for the RIAA/MPAA/Insert Tyrannical Organization Here to control their content for the maximization of profit. There cannot be any particular reason for this price discrepancy except for artificial price inflation and price-fixing (or other similar, rude practices).
While the content producers claim I have no rights to fair use, I know that A) most DVD players have the ability to be set to a “region free” mode (thus making the region encoding on the disc irrelevant), and B) I can always rip and re-encode my DVD into a region-free format (eg. SVCD, one episode per CDR). I’ll have to check into whether a US DVD player can handle a DVD encoded in the PAL format (as opposed to NTSC). I know from experience that a US DVD will play just fine in Europe…
UPDATE (2003-08-22)
There is region encoding, and video encoding. Region encoding is arbitrary, and a way for the producer to control when and where content is released on DVD. The USA is Region 1, the UK is Region 2, etc. Video encoding is simply because different parts of the world developed TV technology at different times, and standardization didn’t happen. It’s just like there being different line voltages in different parts of the world: I can’t just plug a US toaster into the socket in Great Britain; the current and voltage are wrong, and the plug is a different shape.
In most parts of the world, TVs are made to handle both NTSC and PAL encoded video (or, they are made to handle a multitude of video signals). Also, many DVD players (outside the US) are capable of doing the decoding as well, so you can take a DVD with video in the NTSC standard, and the DVD player will convert it to PAL, so the TV can display the image. (See this massive FAQ if you want to know more.)
So, if I buy the DVDs in the UK, someday (assuming I move back to the US when I’m done) I’ll need to buy a DVD player that can do two things:
- The DVD player will need to be capable of ignoring the region encoding on the disc. Many DVD players are capable of this.
- The DVD player will need to be able to convert the PAL signal into an NTSC signal, since US televisions don’t typically have the ability to transcode PAL->NTSC.
At the moment, this looks possible. I’ll assume that a few years from now, it still will be possible.