Drawing together work from global media studies, studies of digital media regulation and governance, and cultural theory, this article analyzes the DVD region code system. It details how the technology came about through a process of global governance that set the terms for home video’s global distribution to the general advantage of Hollywood’s film industries. Rather than presenting a picture of purely top-down technological control, however, it argues that the emergence of region codes represented an international process of technical development and standardization by private media industries that reflected and generated understandings of media regions as both differentiated economic markets and spaces of cultural organization and coherence.
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