Mavi Boncuk |
DVD region codes are a digital rights
management technique introduced in 1997. It is designed to allow rights holders
to control the international distribution of a DVD release, including its
content, release date, and price, all according to the appropriate region.
This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs encoded to their region (plus those without any region code). The American DVD Copy Control Association also requires that DVD player manufacturers incorporate the regional-playback control (RPC) system. However, region-free DVD players, which ignore region coding, are also commercially available, and many DVD players can be modified to be region-free, allowing playback of all discs.
DVDs may use one code, multiple codes (multi-region), or all
codes (region free).
Region codes do not apply to recordable DVDs.
One purpose of region coding is controlling release dates.
One practice of movie marketing which was threatened by the advent of digital
home video was the tradition of releasing a movie to cinemas and then for
general rental or sale later in some countries than in others. This practice
was historically common because before the advent of digital cinema, releasing
a movie at the same time worldwide used to be prohibitively expensive. Most
importantly, manufacturing a release print of a film for public exhibition in a
cinema has always been expensive, but many release prints are needed only for a
narrow window of time during the first few weeks after a film's release.
Spreading out release dates allows for reuse of some release prints in other
regions.
Videotapes were inherently regional since formats had to
match those of the encoding system used by television stations in that
particular region, such as NTSC and PAL, although from the early 1990s PAL
machines increasingly offered NTSC playback. DVDs are less restricted in that
sense. Region coding allows movie studios to better control the global release
dates of DVDs.
Also, the copyright in a title may be held by different
entities in different territories. Region coding enables copyright holders to
(attempt to) prevent a DVD from a region from which they do not derive
royalties from being played on a DVD player inside their region. Region coding
attempts to dissuade importing of DVDs from one region into another.