I'm not a legal expert on these matters, so I won't contest the arguments here as I don't know the facts. I however, seriously doubt any of the other posters are legal experts on this either (and none have offered evidence to support their claims)
I am. This is what I do for a living. I'm a broadcast rights consultant.
Tilpots said:
Not really. Consumers have rights here in the US, not sure about the UK though. If I buy a car, Ford can't tell me to only drive it on Tuesdays.
Ford would be absolutely within their legal rights in the US to tell you to only drive a car on Tuesdays. They don't own the calendar, so it couldn't be considered to be anti-competitive. As long as they were upfront about the restriction at the time of purchase and they had you sign a contract binding you to that condition that you clearly understood at the time of handing over the cash, then they would be completely in the clear to do so. A court might take issue with the level of penalty in a contract for being in breach of it, but not that a breach ocourred.
Likewise, the content providers involved here are many and varied. They don't own the internet browsers, so they are not being anti-competitive. Until you watch their advertising in the programme you haven't given them any financial consideration that might bind them in a contract, and they inform you that you can't watch the programme before that occurs. They are completely free to decide how and if to deliver media to you based on what you want to play it on. You as a consumer have the choice to buy your content from any of the millions of other legal providers if you don't like the terms.
That simple.
Maybe the BBC doesn't hold the international rights, but NBC sure does.
Indeed they do, because Heroes is sold to Apple for the iTunes store in the UK. But it is a good demonstration of how legally it is perfectly acceptable to split rights by the device intended for reception and sell them separately for different rates to different people. NBC sell the BBC rights to deliver to a set top box, but not to mobiles (or indeed the Wii, probably because it's a set top box…).
For an older show made before the advent of internet distribution, you might be right.
Which is the majority of shows on Hulu. And there's no guarantee the various content providers have any reliable database of where they have this right and where they don't, so they can't just remove the shows where they have no rights and have to pull everything.
And again, even when they do have the right, the residuals due to the actors etc concerned might not be the same in many cases. Video on demand generally attracts a different residual to internet distribution (as it's *generally* pay per view rather than advertising funded and has lower overheads once the network is built). Given many cable networks distribute VOD via IP, what VOD is will likely be defined in the contracts with the actors, writers etc by the reception device.
Phazer
