[Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

Wed Jul 23 08:28:25 EDT 2014

The issue isn't the license itself, it's the availability of a distributor who wants to distribute to the market.   The distributor would acquire any needed license when they acquire the product to distribute.

Most content creators don't often distribute directly to viewers. They rely upon distributors - Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and others for a number of reasons including:

- the technical infrastructure needed , as is being called out in our discussion

- the need to provide customer service in the local language

- compliance with local laws and tax

- local marketing

- support for local currency and payment methods

A real problem in fact is that there are small local markets that don't have any distributor who want to acquire the rights to sell to the local  market.   A global license doesn't solve the above requirements which require investment by a distributor.   This isn't too different from a distribute and retailer selling breakfast cereal. They need warehouse space, a store front for customers to visit, customer service , ways to handle payment and ways to pay whatever taxes are required on their business actions.

if you make a product you depend on a distributor to get it into the hands of consumers, and the more paying consumers the better so it's in the producers interest to have their product widely consumed.  It's the existence of a distributor who is willing to invest in the product delivery infrastructure and who will invest in acquiring the product from the producer.

Of course the local market must also permit the distributor to operate there. Meaning that it will support the distributor making a profit so that they can afford to recoup their investment and to see value in reinvestment into expanding the support infrastructure for the local market.

In our digital world as others here have highlighted this means things like in country caches and CDNs and for distributors like iTunes and google play to enter the local market.

On the Internet one barrier the new companies who wish to go into business as digital distributors is access to affordable distribution infrastructure and open standards based off the shelf technology that can do the needed delivery at scale.  If you look at the successful distributors they've invested a lot of R&D money on inventing and building the technical infrastructure they need.

-Glenn

Sent from my iPad, please forgive any tpyos or auto connections

On Jul 23, 2014, at 6:49 AM, "Adam Nelson" <adam at varud.com<mailto:adam at varud.com>> wrote:

Maybe Glenn can give some insight.

Anyway, I think the content owners would make more money on the long tail both with local and global content by moving to a policy of carving big markets out of the global market (i.e. Globe minus US, Canada, Europe, China, etc...) rather than adding markets (US plus Canada plus Europe plus Kenya).

I think they would see very quickly that there are actually people moving around alot and that the demand for something like Chinese content in East Africa is non-zero.  Finding all of those combinations is not reasonable though which is why having the default license be global would really help make local content more available.

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On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com<mailto:michele at blacknight.com>> wrote:
I suspect they'd disagree

Have a look at the licensing deals for any mainstream TV show or movie

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From: Adam Nelson [mailto:adam at varud.com<mailto:adam at varud.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 11:36 AM
To: Michele Neylon - Blacknight
Cc: Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal); bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>; Susan Chalmers

Subject: Re: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

Michele,

The content owners don't make more money with these rules, they simply lose money.  Kenya is a country where it's so impossible to pay for content that it's virtually all stolen.  That can't be good for rights holders.

-Adam

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Kili - Cloud for Africa: kili.io<http://kili.io/>
Musings: twitter.com/varud<https://twitter.com/varud>
More Musings: varud.com<http://varud.com>
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On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com<mailto:michele at blacknight.com>> wrote:
Adam

The licensing issue is a pain.

I can't see it changing any time soon, as the media companies still make a LOT of money from selling the rights in various markets ..
The funniest one I've run into is where t-shirts and other goods weren't available to me here in Ireland due to licensing :) So it's not just digital ..

But I know what you mean ..

We all see stories in the media about new products / services etc., being launched that allow for cheap (inexpensive) legal consumption of media eg. Kindle unlimited, but rarely are these services made available outside the US and UK.

Regards

Michele

--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting, Colocation & Domains
http://www.blacknight.co/
http://blog.blacknight.com/
http://www.technology.ie
Intl. +353 (0) 59  9183072
Direct Dial: +353 (0)59 9183090
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mneylon
-------------------------------
Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd, Unit 12A,Barrowside Business Park,Sleaty
Road,Graiguecullen,Carlow,Ireland  Company No.: 370845

From: Bp_localcontent [mailto:bp_localcontent-bounces at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent-bounces at intgovforum.org>] On Behalf Of Adam Nelson
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 10:13 AM
To: Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal)
Cc: bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>; Susan Chalmers
Subject: Re: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

I'd like to jump in here and make a few points.  To make Susan's life easier, I'll break them into sections:

------Technical Infrastructure---------
I'd like to second Michael's statements.  I'm the founder of a cloud infrastructure startup in Nairobi (i.e. hosting) and we're just now getting off the ground.  Aside from us and one other company which started last year as well, there is no modern local hosting capacity for Internet-facing services in all of East Africa.  Virtually all content consumed by Kenyans is hosted abroad.  This isn't just an academic issue - the Internet is literally slower here because of the distance all that data has to travel.  Aside from Google which has a POP on the coast, most streaming video doesn't work properly - it's a real problem not just for local content consumers, but also for local content producers.  A major hurdle to the production and dissemination of local content is the lack of local hosting solutions.

-----Regulatory Infrastructure---------
I'm going to spin this one on its head.  I'm an American living in Kenya.  Local content to me includes both content for Kenyans (because I live here) but also American content for Americans (because that's my identity and I enjoy American content).  Ironically, most American content is unavailable here or can only be gotten by technical deception (vpn) or outright theft (torrent).  I think the issue here is that the licensing environment defines which countries have access to content as opposed to which ones do not.

I would love somebody to clarify whether this is the case but it seems to me that when content is produced, it is licensed to distributors based on blocks of countries and therefore, most content isn't available in smaller markets at all.  This drives piracy but also makes certain content unavailable by any means.  For instance, 'Nairobi Half Life' is a great Kenyan movie and can be gotten either on the street for $1 on DVD or torrent, but nowhere else.  When distributed properly by an entity like iTunes, the rights to the movie may not even be available in Kenya.

The solution I would like to see to this would be to make all content default to a global license.  Then, rightsholders could 'exclude' certain regions from the global license in order to maximize their income.  In this scenario, a movie made by a US company would get a global license as soon as it hits broad distribution but there would be carve outs for major markets like the US or Europe or China (or all of them) in order to get proper distribution.  This would allow local content producers using foreign channels to re-access local content consumers in smaller markets.

Cheers,
Adam

--
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Musings: twitter.com/varud<https://twitter.com/varud>
More Musings: varud.com<http://varud.com>
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On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal) <glenn.deen at nbcuni.com<mailto:glenn.deen at nbcuni.com>> wrote:
Should local language search and metadata be added to the list of technical barriers  ?

This is the question of metadata which describe the content - simple things like title and author, but richer fields like description, location, date, other related content etc - and what fields will be in the local language , what fields will be in english(because a lots of metadata is in English so that search engines can ingest easily) and where it might be possible to have fields that support multiple languages to be simultaneously present in the metadata, and for both to be ingested by the search engines that users will use to find the local content.

Regards
Glenn

Sent from my iPad, please forgive any tpyos or auto connections

On Jul 21, 2014, at 2:40 AM, "Michael Kende" <kende at isoc.org<mailto:kende at isoc.org>> wrote:
Hi Susan,
Many thanks again.  I will focus here for the most part on the technical infrastructure issues, for which I would include data centers, hosting, content delivery networks, and IXPs.  At one level, there are no impediments, as someone developing local content has access to very inexpensive hosting offers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, enabling them to make their content available globally, particularly to expats from their country as well as locally within their country and region.  However, as discussed elsewhere, this access will be slow and require expensive international capacity to ‘bring it home’.  This will in turn limit usage, and my hypothesis is that it would impact the amount of new local content that is developed as there is no large market, or interest, in local content given the cost and latency.  We will try our part in testing this hypothesis, and would be interested in other thoughts on the subject.
At the local level, there clearly are impediments to the technical infrastructure, both actual and perceived.  In terms of actual impediments, based on my experience (unfortunately I do not know of any data on this) there may either be no data centers for hosting, or they are owned by the ISPs and thus not neutral.  There may also be frequent power outages.  Further, the pricing may be very high, based on high costs (e.g. For power) and/or low scale.  On the other hand, there also seems to be a perception about low quality (in terms of security) which may or may not be true.
One initiative to take would be to bring together the industry, convened either by an industry body or by government, to address perceptions and then the remaining actual issues – so for instance, discuss security issues (during the one we held in Rwanda someone told a story of their US hosting company crashing and wiping out most of their data, while no one had a bad experience with a local company), and pricing issues – whether the offers are addressing the needs of the local providers.
I heard of such a meeting in Nigeria, where an owner of a Nigerian video streaming company, hosted in London, complained that no one in Nigeria could reliably stream his movies from his site, and could not understand why the same movies could be watched from YouTube – that is where he learned about the Google local cache and the impact of the IXP, and focused on putting in his own server to increase his local market.
Governments that host their own data locally also may help to create a local industry.   We would be interested in learning more about other initiatives that may have been taken elsewhere to address this issue.
Thanks
Michael

From: Susan Chalmers <susan at susanchalmers.com<mailto:susan at susanchalmers.com>>
Date: Sunday 20 July 2014 23:32
To: "bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>" <bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>>
Subject: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

Greetings all,

It's now time to move on to the third area of our discussion on local content best practices, and that is identifying existing policy measures and private sector initiatives & impediments for the creation of local content.

I'd like to remind the group of the tripartite structure we've adopted, and invite all to make contributions under this framework. For example, please note measures and initiatives under these categories:

Area 1 - Human Capacities
Area 2 - Technical Infrastructure
Area 3 - Legal Frameworks

Many thanks!

Sincerely,
Susan

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