USA: Geofilters lock out Digi-TV viewers

In the age of online TV, TV stations are using geofilters to secure their license business.TV stations are increasingly putting their programmes online for free, and not just in America. However, the television business is territorial, which is why downloads could severely impact the licensing business with local and international broadcasters. Geofilters are now increasingly being used to keep customers of individual partners or from certain countries away from the online offer. As Heise.de reports, Fox, for example, now only allows viewers from the USA to make use of the online offer. As a result, viewers no longer remain anonymous and are currently identified by their IP address. However, a further increase and refinement of geo-filtering techniques is likely to become tricky in connection with data protection.