Friday, September 16, 2011

European release but not in the UK

Once again I try to find something that may or may not have been released in Europe, but most definitely didn't make it to our fair shores. Last time it was the Goodies Yum Yum CD for my father; this time it's the Dead Like Me DVD. Now sure I can pop over to Amazon.DE, but my German is seriously rusty. Yeah I can guess what the buttons mean, but it would be nice if I could see it in English.

And so I return to InAndOut in Austria. English site, priced in Euros with a rough Pound Sterling equivalent; and if you're wary of foreign transactions you can use PayPal. There is a shipping cost and it does tend to end up being slightly more than getting it from whichever Amazon branch actually stocks the same thing, but not by much and hey they've gone to the trouble to produce an English written site that stocks what I can't easily find elsewhere at a comparable price. Personally I think that means they get my business.

2 comments:

Orphi said...

I would think a far bigger problem is that a European DVD probably has the wrong region code.

After all, let's face it, the entire purpose for region codes existing in the first place is to artificially prevent you doing exactly what you're describing — buying the stuff from another country.

This presumably allows the distributor to charge you multiple times the price for the same product just because you happen to live in the wrong country.

FlipC said...

All of Europe is Region 2 for DVD and Blu-ray. It's only if you start buying from the Americas or Asia etc. that it starts getting messy.

The logic goes that you have the people who made the media who then contract out the rights to distribute the media within that region.

In theory this makes sense due to varying copyright laws, film and television standards language issues etc. On occasion this is true however given the size of the regions, particularly the larger blu-ray ones, this is pretty much rubbish.

In reality the distributor pays the creator and takes all the risk if the media doesn't sell well in that particular region.