An Alternative to Geofencing

Photo: a typical geofencing message.

Last week at Mesh, my final thoughts on the Video is Everywhere discussion panel that I participated in was that I wish we had gotten to talk about geofencing. It didn’t come up in our conversation there, so I thought I’d bring it up here and hopefully start a discussion online.

First, what is geofencing? Most internet users have run across messages like the one in the screenshot I’ve posted above, but few people that I’ve spoken with know why they get them. The answer is lies in sales & international distribution.

Rights to video content are often bought & sold by geographical region — usually by country. If I buy the rights to The Daily Show in Argentina, I want to be sure that the U.S. won’t snap up my customers online by offering the show to my audience there. So, access to content online often gets restricted based upon what country you’re in. It sounds fair for the rights purchaser, but what about the consumer?

Let’s stick with the example of The Daily Show to see what experience the consumer has when content is geofenced. This scenario has happened to me more than once:

1. I click a link on Digg to a supposedly hilarious John Stewart clip.
2. The submitter was American, so the link comes from deep inside ComedyCentral.com.
3. Because I’m in Canada, when I click the link, I’m automatically redirected to ComedyNetwork.ca, who owns the rights to The Daily Show in Canada.
4. Unfortunately, I’m not redirected to the same clip (which may or may not be available on your regional site) but to the ComedyNetwork home page.
5. I don’t see the clip I clicked a link for, so I leave the site.

I often use social network sites to discover the best video clips. Unfortunately, geofencing hinders this sort of social discovery and when a user doesn’t find what they’re expecting on a site, they usually leave resulting in a high bounce rate for that site.

Fortunately for Canadians, ComedyNetwork offers a lot of clips from The Daily Show to watch, but the same may not be true of other broadcasters or shows. Even if your broadcaster has published clips, redirection to your regional site is never (in my experience) to the same piece of content, but instead takes you to the home page.

Essentially, both sites abandon the user. ComedyCentral rejects any Canadian user automatically and ComedyNetwork doesn’t deliver the video I went to see without more searching (or at all). All of this is not only bad for the user, it’s also bad for both sites.

Still, there’s a valid concern that without geofencing the purchaser could steal audiences away from what are essentially its resellers. But, geofencing is an unattractive solution for the seller, buyer and consumer.

So, I’d like to propose an alternative: geosharing. Instead of redirecting users geographically, share revenue with your resellers based on user country of origin. Geosharing lets broadcasters stop the practice of redirection and lets audiences view the videos they came to see. With geosharing, If a friend from the UK sends me a clip, I get to view the clip and the reseller in Canada gets a cut. Geosharing is not without its technical and licensing challenges, but geofencing is a user experience nightmare that benefits neither consumers or broadcasters.