Russia To Require Netflix To Stream State Television Broadcasts (themoscowtimes.com) 62
Russia's state media watchdog will require Netflix to offer state television channels to its Russian customers after it added the U.S.-based streaming service to its register of "audio-visual services" this week. From a report: Roskomnadzor's register, which was created in late 2020, applies to online streaming services with over 100,000 daily users and requires them to comply with Russian law and register a Russian company. Registered services are also required to provide streams of 20 major Russian federal television channels. From March 2022, Netflix will be obliged to offer broadcasts from flagship state-owned Channel One, entertainment-focused NTV and the Russian Orthodox Church's in-house channel Spas, which means "Saved," to its users within Russia. The laws that Netflix must now obey include controversial provisions banning the promotion of "extremism" -- a restriction which has been used against supporters of the anti-Kremlin opposition.
Like US cable bundles (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of like US cable companies bundling Fox, whether the customer wants it or not.
This, in fact, is where most of Fox's money comes from. It doesn't come from advertising.
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In all honestly, this is a bit of a non-issue.
Requiring Netflix to carry content from domestic channels that are government owned/operated is not an issue. The reason people might balk at, or decry this, is because the closest thing the US has is PBS, and HBO has effectively paywalled the content that people would want PBS for (Sesame Street.) If you look at Netflix, there is content from Brazil, Japan, Korea, India, and Canada which is funded or produced by television channels owned/operated by their gover
Re:Like US cable bundles (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah. I have explained badly because it is, in fact, an issue. The issue is that the entire economic basis of Fox News is tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people who never watch it and who don't particularly want to support it but are forced to if they want any cable service at all.
This is the monopolistic-capitalist version of a Russian-government mandate, so it's not the same, but it comes from an equally bad place and leads to a bad result. What both have in common is that people are forced to pay for things that they don't want, that they may even abhor.
I don't see the relevance of the gratuitous swipes at Americans. You're clearly right about nudity and violence, but I don't think it a bad thing that people want to see programs in a language that they understand. None of this is relevant to my point, though.
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The issue is that the entire economic basis of Fox News is tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people who never watch it and who don't particularly want to support it but are forced to if they want any cable service at all.
Nobody is being forced to do anything. It's like the same fallacious argument with Facebook's service somehow being forced upon people, as if at gunpoint. If you don't want cable, don't subscribe to it. Your life will go on just fine without being able to instantly access 100+ channels of crap.
The reality is, people who still subscribe to cable TV in an age of on-demand streaming services probably aren't the most clued-in sort of folks, and they likely are the typical Fox News watching demographic.
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You certainly labelled all Americans with the comment!
Acorn, BritBox, PBS Masterpiece (sub-channel in Amazon Prime), and other media products are all sold in the USA and I, personally, subscribe to all three so that I can watch foreign content. Since Roku, Amazon Prime, Netflix, et all offer foreign.non-USA content, it must be popular in the USA.
You might want to reconsider what you wrote. It certainly describes a ster
Re: Like US cable bundles (Score:2)
Re: Like US cable bundles (Score:2)
"Americans have more problems with nudity than violence, which is the reverse of every civilized country."
Don't forget that America was settled (conquered) by Puritans, Calvinists, and Conquistadors (in the west and also highly religious). It's very hard to shake something that had so much momentum over the last few centuries.
But yeah, "gun violence ok, but don't you dare show a nipple" is silly and very outdated.
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It's a bit of a non-non-issue, that is, it's a real issue. This is being mandated by the government, a repressive and non-democratic government, and so Netflix should push back or pull out from Russia with a big notice about how they don't cooperate with dictators.
Nothing in the US is even remotely similar. What governments in the US, state, federal, local, require you to host PBS? What governments in the US require repeating state propaganda?
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What governments in the US, state, federal, local, require you to host PBS?
All of them (assuming "you" are a cable operator), although the same rules apply to all local channels as well:
https://www.fcc.gov/media/cabl... [fcc.gov]
Alternatively, local commercial and noncommercial television broadcast stations may require a cable operator serving the same market to carry their signals. This demand for carriage is commonly referred to as "must-carry."
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non-Russian speaking Americans likely won't go looking for the Russian state-owned television content.
No, that's a separate channel -- the Russian-propaganda English language channel RT is available on DIRECTV, Dish, and as a channel on Roku, in addition to a few local cable systems:
https://www.rt.com/where-to-wa... [rt.com]
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Numbers for 2021: https://variety.com/2021/tv/ne... [variety.com]
Numbers for 2020: https://variety.com/2020/tv/ne... [variety.com]
Numbers for 2019: https://variety.com/2019/tv/ne... [variety.com]
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While parent was obviously doing BS spinning for his partisan causes, yours argument is also ridiculous with making an argument that Fox News is not anti-mainstream rather than mainstream.
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You're just another example of having swallowed their crap and being fine with it rather than questioning the circumstances of everything.
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According to your own numbers, Fox and Fox News are mainstream channels. The only "crap" that I swallowed is the numbers in articles you just linked.
That's what I'm pointing out. Your post is internally contradictory. Either numbers in your articles are correct, and those two are mainstream, and therefore you can argue that Fox deserves that money because it's a pretty big part of what sells the package. It's popular enough among mainstream public that it's a major selling point.
Or you can argue that Fox is
Mystery science theater version (Score:5, Funny)
I think I'd watch fox or Russian state TV if there was a mystery science theater version making fun of Tucker Carlson's idiocy in real time.
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Kind of like US cable companies bundling Fox, whether the customer wants it or not.
This, in fact, is where most of Fox's money comes from. It doesn't come from advertising.
And the reason you singled out Fox is...? Do you think that every person who gets CNN in his bundle actually wants it?
Re:Like US cable bundles (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair question.
I quote: ... [F]or every actual viewer, Fox News receives a $7.75 subsidy from people who never watch Fox News. This is a higher subsidy than other non-sports channels, like FX ($1.79), CNN ($3.18), and TBS ($2.79), receive. "
Source:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
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Re:Like US cable bundles (Score:4, Interesting)
No, that's just weird. CNN and TBS aren't splitting some mysterious pot of leftist money. That's not how the subsidies work. Each network negotiates on its own. Even if there were some mysterious "leftist" money being split, CNN and TBS (= Turner) added together are still subsidized less than Fox. And FX, which is Disney, isn't in the same universe at all.
For what it's worth, there are proposals in the air to have a single "News" bundle for Fox and CNN and Bloombers and whatever. I don't like this because it's still a bundle, but it makes more sense that being forced to pay for Fox or CNN because you have a kid that wants Disney.
The point stands that Fox gets a much, much bigger subsidy than any of the others..
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it makes more sense that being forced to pay for Fox or CNN because you have a kid that wants Disney.
Yeah, why sign up for Disney Plus at $8/mo., when you can sign up for 100+ channels of utter garbage for a cost that usually starts at around six times the price?
Re: Like US cable bundles (Score:2)
Fox extorts money from the leftists, and, being pretty much the sole right-wing media channel
All US news channels are right-wing. CNN doesn't do any of these things, so it most definitely isn't on the left:
* It doesn't advocate for direct government ownership of all factories, farms and businesses;
* It doesn't advocate for the expropriation of the means of production from the hands of capitalists and for committees of workers to administrate all companies;
* It doesn't advocated for complete equality of rent as a prerequisite for political equality;
* It doesn't advocate for the collectivization of f
Re:Like US cable bundles (Score:5, Insightful)
No, is precisely not like that. This says that sufficiently large steaming companies must carry Russian state media (propaganda). It's not at all like cable companies deciding to contract with a private network that many of their customers want.
If you want an example if a TV network that should be unbundled, look at CNN, which now has fewer viewers than Home and Garden TV [adweek.com].
Re: Like US cable bundles (Score:3)
Not sure why Fox is ok and CNN isn't in your example. CNN was the third most watched news network in November. There are lots of networks that aren't very popular but get bundled anyway.
Either way, to my knowledge TV "bundles" aren't mandated by the government to have certain networks, especially government-run networks. Forcing a private company like Netflix to carry government networks (propaganda or not) would probably be shot down in the US based upon first amendment rights.
More important to me is the
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I did not say CNN was not okay, just that if someone argues for unbundling channels based on lack of demand, they should look at the third most watched news network rather than the most watched one -- after all, there are only three large news networks in US television.
I agree that Russia will be very quick to label dissidents and political opponents of the regime as "extremists". Almost the same thing happened recently with the civil rights group Memorial, which was just ordered to shut down, and more rec
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It is plain and simple - USA has the "interrupt all programming and broadcast a civil defence warning" law + regulation + technical means. It was put in there because of a USA specific problem - Tornadoes. By the way Netflix has that facility in the USA, it is just not widely advertised.
Russia (same as most other countries) do not have the relevant law, regulation and technical systems to do that. There, emergency broadcasts are on state channe
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Kind of like US cable companies bundling Fox, whether the customer wants it or not.
This, in fact, is where most of Fox's money comes from. It doesn't come from advertising.
You seem awfully angry about the most watched news network in the US.
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I think that people should pay for cable channels they watch and they shouldn't be forced to pay for cable channels they don't watch, which is what bundling is. Bundling is bad. Fox is the biggest beneficiary of bundling, so that makes Fox the worst channel in this respect.
I'm not angry; I have no idea where you got that from. If my words seems angry, then I have expressed myself badly.
Disclaimer: I don't have cable myself (or any tv, for that matter), so this is all sort of theoretical for me.
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whether the customer wants it or not.
It doesn't sound happy.
I get that you dislike bundling, but singling out a news station that is incredibly popular seems odd, considering all the other bundled crap.
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Oh, *all* the bundled crap is bundled crap. We agree on that. I singled out Fox because it gets way, way more subsidies from the bundling than any other network. If it's so popular, it should have an easier time paying its own way than the other networks, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Re: Like US cable bundles (Score:1)
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As far as the extremism label on Navalny it is entirely his and his payroled staff fault. No, not kidding, not trolling, that is actually the case - keep on reading.
I have observed their Instagram chats and Telegram channels while they were around. His regional and global admins in order to keep the maximum possible number of subscribers (which was a p
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To put things into perspective - try downloading or sharing on social media the Anarchist cookbook
Downloading isn't a problem. Hell, I think I had it up on my old dial-up BBS back in the day, with a big "don't try this at home" disclaimer in the description. Sharing on social media might be a problem if someone flags you, because services run by private businesses have their own TOS policies. It's no different than Walmart telling you to get lost if you go there to harass the other shoppers, rather than to buy stuff. Their roof, their rules.
in the UK.
Oh.
It's just a tax (Score:3)
Requiring Netflix to carry your content is basically a tax on Netflix, but how big of a burden are we talking here?
Are they providing the content for free and insisting they stream it, or are they insisting the Netflix pay for the production of the content?
Do they want a cut of every subscription fee that receives it, or do they just want it to be available?
If I were in charge of Netflix, I'd offer to carry all free government channels and make them available to every subscriber, not just the local ones.
The cost is minuscule, and value of being able to say the content is available is huge.
Youtube carries just about anyone's content and makes it available to just about everyone for pretty much exactly that reason.
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Haven't had a subscription in years, but I can't remember that they do. They only offer on demand streaming of licensed products or their own stuff.
Hence having them broadcast regular TV seems odd from the get-go. Maybe some bad translation or interpretation (intentional or unintentional), which is not uncommon? Maybe they just want Netflix to provide more Russian content?
To me it seems the easiest way would be for all those Federal channels to have their own
I kind of wish they would show it in the US (Score:2)
I would subscribe (at least temporarily) to a streaming service that had the state TV channels from lots of countries.
The ones in Western countries would have content actually interesting to watch (BBC, etc), and the ones in authoritarian countries would be just amusing to watch even without subtitles.
It always annoyed me that the BBC channel in the US wasn't just a live version of what was literally on the telly in the UK. I don't want curated content shaped for US audience, I want the actual channel as s
Re: I kind of wish they would show it in the US (Score:2)
Do citizens still require a television license in the UK? If so, having a raw feed could cause some legal issues for the BBC.
UK TV licence still in place (Score:2)
So yes, it would be unfair on us Brits who pay for the BBC channels without adverts.
Why not? (Score:2)
Netflix: "Sure. It will cost us nothing as nobody will click on it."
Extremism (Score:1)
They canâ(TM)t comply with anti-Extremismus and show Putin propaganda at the same time.
Huh? (Score:2)
I thought Russia was one of the countries trying to move away from foreign technology and dependencies.
Netflix already Streams State Media. (Score:1)
Just like other Authoritarian Dictatorships (Score:1)
Canada does the same thing.
Germany and Austria are moving to ban telegram (Score:2)
Anti-lockdown protests are going on in these countries and since California media is censoring, blocking and banning everything about it, they moved to Telegram.
And now for the first time since 1945, a German and an Austrian Chancellor is trying to actively and heavily block telecommunication between citizens and making only state-approved messengers legal and technically possible. The Axis is back in the game. Italy and Spain are sympathising with this move, too, but are probably waiting what Germany and A