The Power of Media (Bring Down the MPAA)

I truly despise the MPAA. Because of their stupid rules on DVD distribution, I cannot simply pay the extra money to import foreign films I want to watch as I can with CDs, which are region-free and limited in distribution only by one’s ability to fund international shipping. For example, when it comes to the old Soviet-era sci-fi movies I really want to own, regional encoding means I have to buy either a region-free DVD player (which is of dubious legality and questionable reliability), a region-free DVD (with similar caveats, though I’ve bought some when someone performed the courtesy of pirating it), or I’m stuck trying to find a low quality copy on the pirate networks. This is to say nothing of the encoding problems between PAL and NTSC, which would prevent me from importing most DVDs anyway.

How frustrating! Even if I were to buy an imported copy of, say, Planeta Bur, a 1962 Soviet film about an abortive landing on Venus, I wouldn’t really be able to play it, unless I did some weird tweaks to my Powerbook so it could play PAL. As for some other movies I desperately want to get my hands on, such as Nebo Zovyot, or Ikarie XB 1? Well, I’ll just have to deal with it, I suppose. Or fire up my BitTorrent client.

I should never have watched the original, Andrei Tarkovsky version of Solyaris—which was stunning in every sense of the word—for now I have an insatiable appetite for Soviet sci-fi, and other foreign sci-fi of yesteryear that took a longer look at people in extraordinary situations, rather than following the American formula of just filling up the screen with pretty CGI and lots of explosions. Alas, the MPAA seems determined to deny me anything useful from outside our fortress borders, so I am stuck with crap like Sunshine.

I bring this up because of an interesting guest post at Steve LeVine’s blog by Sasha Meyer. It is about Central Asian countries taking advantage of Joost to promote themselves.

Many countries and region have an image problem. Central Asia has a different one: It has virtually no image. And the 2006 release of a faux documentary featuring a faux Kazakh journalist left many in the region with the belief that, if you don’t create your own image, someone else will. Or worse: In the popular mind, Central Asia will get lumped together with its volatile neighbors to the south, resulting in an unwanted and unwarranted association with violence and religious militancy. That’s the opposite of how most Central Asians want their societies to be perceived: as secular and modernizing…

Most or all the Central Asian governments will be reluctant to strike a deal with Joost, but they oughtn’t be. Just like Skype, it offers instantaneous global reach at no cost. It delivers its content in TV-quality, unlike YouTube and similar services with bandwidth limitations. And, unlike traditional satellite and cable TV companies, Joost can have an infinite number of channels. Joost also accepts only professional content; no YouTube-like amateur clips here.

This is a fantastic idea. I’ve played around with Joost, and I like it—a lot. It’s like on-demand cable, only without having to pay through the nose for crap like old episodes of Sex and the City. The incredible documentary Inside Afghanistan, for example, is there on the National Geographic channel—it follows author Sebastian Junger in the fall of 2000 as he gives one of the last Western interviews to Ahmed Shah Massoud, and follows the horrid cost of the Taliban’s campaign of terror well before it was trendy to do so. There are a few other offerings on there about Central Asia (including a strange deer hunt in Kazakhstan). It could work, at least in theory.

The one drawback of Joost? Because it is legitimate, and strikes official deals with studios and production companies, selection limited. It is also subject to many of the same geographical limitations as DVDs: many streams cannot be viewed outside of North America. This can of course be solved by the production company—in this case, one from Central Asia—simply stipulating that there should be no regional limitations. But many of these companies have struck deals with those in the West with the resources to remaster, reformat, and globally distribute those works, which would suggest there may be tight restrictions on the countries and regions in which they could be viewed even on a no-cost global Internet distribution platform.

In other words, the Western media companies, which are already strangling an international meeting of the creative minds with their dumb insistence on restricting DVD sales to both fans and producers in other countries, not only keep me from legally buying movies I want to see (while threatening prosecution if I acquire them through illicit means, such as BitTorrent), but might actively strangle a chance for Central Asia to expand its global cultural presence. That is, if they can avoid future embarrassments like Nomad.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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