You may have heard a few weeks ago about President Obama's gift to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a collection of classic American movies.  The British were appalled of course because it was so low-brow of the Americans to give movies as a gift, when the Brits brought a pen from a 19th century British war ship.  But the biggest problem with the whole thing was that the offending DVDs didn't even play in the Browns' DVD player. 

Why didn't they play?  Well, the powers that be created DVD player regulations to allow the movie industry to control when, with what content, and for what price DVDs are released in different parts of the world.  So DVDs have to be authored specifically for the players in the regions where they are going to be used.  Some DVD players are universal so they can play DVDs from any region but most consumer players are regional.  Mr. Brown had a bunch of Region 1 DVDs that don't play on a Region 2 DVD player.

We don't have to do it a lot but at least a couple of times a year, I have to send videos to clients in Europe and Asia.  In the video world we were still using Beta pretty regularly until the past 3 or 4 years so the switch to DVD made things a little bit easier.  Now we have a new format, Blu-ray.  I had a moment of panic the other day when we sent a Blu-ray disc to Germany and one to China because I had forgotten about regions.  Fortunately, our encoding mastermind informed me that they were created as universal region discs.  There are only 3 regions for Blu-ray and according to Wikipedia, almost 70% of Blu-ray are region-free so it's getting easier but there's still some level of complexity that most of us never think about, even the President of the United States.

The lesson for me is that in an increasingly global business-world we need to spend a little time understanding the culture of our clients and partners, whether it's how to greet someone or what region their DVD player is.