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

Wed Jul 23 08:31:25 EDT 2014

Payment also limits the ability for a local creator and local distributor to also sell to the global market.  They need to be able to get payment from their global customers.

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

On Jul 23, 2014, at 7:54 AM, "Michele Neylon - Blacknight" <michele at blacknight.com<mailto:michele at blacknight.com>> wrote:

Michael

The payment issue also impacts both the supply of content and services by non-local companies and local ones.

Being able to sell (and buy) easily online is an issue

Regards

Michele
--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting, Colocation & Domains
http://www.blacknight.co/
http://blog.blacknight.com/
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From: Michael Kende [mailto:kende at isoc.org]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 12:48 PM
To: Michele Neylon - Blacknight; Adam Nelson; 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

Thanks Michele, that is an excellent point.  We came across the issue in Rwanda as well and I am not sure what the source is of these restrictions on PayPal.
Although in the US, at least initially, Google would bill via the mobile operator, but I suppose that is for contract subscribers, and not pre-pay, and I am not sure if they still do that.
As it turns out, Apple enforces restrictions by the country of the credit card, as opposed to IPs. I am not sure why that is the case.   In any case, with a US credit card, you have access to all the US content anywhere in the world – that is what we started to do when we moved from the US to Switzerland.  I believe that this works if you buy a pre-paid iTunes card in the US (or off the US website) as well….
Michael

From: Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com<mailto:michele at blacknight.com>>
Date: Wednesday 23 July 2014 13:41
To: Michael Kende <kende at isoc.org<mailto:kende at isoc.org>>, Adam Nelson <adam at varud.com<mailto:adam at varud.com>>, "Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal)" <glenn.deen at nbcuni.com<mailto:glenn.deen at nbcuni.com>>
Cc: "bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>" <bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>>, Susan Chalmers <susan at susanchalmers.com<mailto:susan at susanchalmers.com>>
Subject: RE: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

Michael

There's also the matter of payment methods ..
Paypal, for example, wasn't available in Serbia or Montenegro up until a couple of months ago and probably isn't available in many other countries ..
As for itunes - logging into an Irish iTunes account is very different to the experience you get with a US one. With an Irish one I can't even buy ringtones as far as I know
And forget about tv - it simply doesn't exist

As a sidenote, however, Google enforces restrictions using IPs, Apple doesn't.

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: Michael Kende [mailto:kende at isoc.org]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 12:36 PM
To: Michele Neylon - Blacknight; Adam Nelson; 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

Hello,
On this point, in June we released our first annual Global Internet Report, and in one section looked at differences in user experience between countries.  To highlight differences in licensing, we looked at the availability of the six types of Google Play content (apps, movies, books, etc.) by country, to show the following below.  For starters, only 66% of countries had access even to Apps, many of the other categories were only available in a few countries.  This is not to focus on Google, of course – I believe that iTunes had similar availability issues, and the Google availability is increasing quickly, even since we started gathering the data.  In the report there is also a heat map, showing which countries have all six types of content, then five, then four, etc.  The full report is available on our website.
I will leave my colleague Konstantinos to comment further on the licensing issues, as this is one of his areas of expertise.
Best,
Michael

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From: Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com<mailto:michele at blacknight.com>>
Date: Wednesday 23 July 2014 11:57
To: Adam Nelson <adam at varud.com<mailto:adam at varud.com>>, "Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal)" <glenn.deen at nbcuni.com<mailto:glenn.deen at nbcuni.com>>
Cc: "bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>" <bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org<mailto:bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>>, Susan Chalmers <susan at susanchalmers.com<mailto:susan at susanchalmers.com>>
Subject: Re: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

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] 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

--
Kili - Cloud for Africa: kili.io<http://kili.io/>
Musings: twitter.com/varud<https://twitter.com/varud>
More Musings: varud.com<http://varud.com>
About Adam: www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson<https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson>

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

--
Susan Chalmers
Consultant, Internet Policy

+1 269 324 4101
www.susanchalmers.com<http://www.susanchalmers.com>
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