I just watched this past Thursday’s episode of Burn Notice and while somehow the news of Tricia Helfer having a minor recurring role on Burn Notice was all over my RSS reader, the guest appearance of Michael Shanks as the character “Victor” for an anticipated four episodes slid right past me. You can get more detail on the Official Michael Shanks Website.
If you’re in the U.S., you can watch the episode via Hulu below (if you’re not in the U.S., my apologies for the irritation).
Why is it that our networks won't allow persons outside the U. S. free access to these shows like we get? My daughter lives in Japan and quite frankly she would like to watch OUR shows on her computer. It isn't as if she would be watching them sometime later on Japanese TV. She is even in the demo. She likes the CBS shows. It would be convenient for her to watch episodes from the CBS website but she can't because she is out of the country.
It just seems short sighted to block people. After all wouldn't you want to promote shows to an audience that may come back to the U. S. and watch or may want to buy the dvd? It just seems to be good PR.
Mabirdy: licensing rights.
It's the same reason people from Germany can't watch the NBC Olympics streams and the same reason I can't watch the German coverage (without trying to run some technology end-arounds): licensing rights. The rights to broadcast these shows in other countries gets sold, and the US doesn't own those rights and so it would be illegal for Hulu to stream shows to people in Japan when it doesn't own the Japanese rights to the content. The blocking is simply to comply with the licensing rights.
It isn't short-sighted to geo-block given the current way the content is sold/licensed. And because online is still relatively insignificant in terms of viewing, there is a lot more money to made licensing content the way it's currently licensed,