Since many of these comments discuss piracy and content distribution, allow me to give you an unprompted insight from a country which is in a worse situation than the USA.
As of today, the country I live in offer very few legal content distribution platform for movies and television shows, and none of them has neither tolerable pricing and acceptable DRM policies nor non-laughable title selection, proper listing & metadata—for example, I would not be able to know in which quality I am renting a movie. Anyway, most of the movies simply do not hit digital distribution.
Physical movie rental is dying quite rapidly for most obvious reasons, which means that the few remaining services are starving and offer nothing but the safest-hitting movies.
As a remarkably honest biped (who, e.g., bought two Adobe Suite licenses, one for his PC & one for his Mac, and has purchased WinRAR), I am thus being put in the hilariously paradoxical position where not only I am hardly incentivized to legally purchase content, but I am unable to do so. I am struggling to do so, and I can not; this is such a tragicomical condition that my fruitless effort to legally retrieve movies&shows has become a running joke within my circle of friends.
Adding insult to injury, every single major firm persists on sticking to this ridicolously unreasonable regional distribution paradigm—which adds basically no value even from a job-creation standpoint— whereas I would be absolutely happy to throw money at them by purchasing non-localized content.
P.S.
To be clear, I live in European first-world country, where the value of the movie market is more than big enough to justify sensible business investments.
I would be interested to see what happened if someone did that. My guess would be that the content producers (movie industry) would begin legal action as while you paid for the content you didn't pay for it in the manner they dictated.
The point of the cashier's check is that they don't know who you are. I have a hard time believing that someone who paid market value for the content and didn't even require distribution service would be in a worse position than someone who pirated the content and paid nothing.
As a remarkably honest biped (who, e.g., bought two Adobe Suite licenses, one for his PC & one for his Mac, and has purchased WinRAR), I am thus being put in the hilariously paradoxical position where not only I am hardly incentivized to legally purchase content, but I am unable to do so. I am struggling to do so, and I can not; this is such a tragicomical condition that my fruitless effort to legally retrieve movies&shows has become a running joke within my circle of friends. Adding insult to injury, every single major firm persists on sticking to this ridicolously unreasonable regional distribution paradigm—which adds basically no value even from a job-creation standpoint— whereas I would be absolutely happy to throw money at them by purchasing non-localized content.
P.S. To be clear, I live in European first-world country, where the value of the movie market is more than big enough to justify sensible business investments.