I thought I would raise the thorny subject of why it is that your DVD players are restricted so that if you, for instance, but a disc in the US as I have you cannot play them on your players back home. The CDs I brought back from New York play great. DVDs no. Why is it? Because the motion picture industry wants to control what we see and hear and look after their interests. The same motion picture industry who when video recorders came along said it would decimate the industry. The truth is that they cashed in on committing their movies to video for sales. And they are still cashing in on the various editions you end up seeing of the DVD of the film. Have just been doing work in connection with the latest results from Disney, the big daddies of the movie world. And they make interesting reading. Disney recorded a first-quarter profit of $1.7 billion, more than double the $734 million posted this time last year. Revenue grew 10% to $9.725bn from $8.854 billion in the same period last year. And what has driven this? Why DVD sales. Fancy that. Studio Entertainment revenues for the quarter increased 29% to $2.6 billion and segment operating income increased from $128 million to $604 million, driven by strong DVD sales of, among others, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Disney/Pixar's Cars, and the Little Mermaid Platinum Release. So it is not affecting the sales of the industry. Now it is all about downloaded movies. Walmart has just started offering more than 3,000 movie and TV titles for sale, which of course will only be able to be bought by people living in the US. It is now offering new movies for download on the same day as their DVD release, for $12.88 to $19.88. It's selling older movies starting at $7.50 and TV shows at $1.96 an episode. Digital downloads are not likely to take over from DVDs in the near future though, according to analysts. More than 80% of homes have DVD players and people just prefer to have something they can handle.. a product. It is estimated that last generated year downloads sales amount to $250m in the U.S. vs. $16bn in DVD sales. Yankee expects digital download sales to remain below $1 billion through 2011. All of which means big bucks for the movie industry. So it is time we ended the ridiculous restrictions. It has got to the point you can look on Amazon and find that they are offering ways to unlock DVDs they are selling. They will be the ones that are easy to pick, from what I could gather. I found my own solution because try as I might I kept getting a closed door when trying to get hacks for my Panasonic and Sony. Both needed modding whatever that is and it was all going to cost a packed and internal manipulations of all sorts. A workmate heard of my plight and recommended a site called DVD Unlocks 4u that he found through a friend who had found success in unlocking her Panasonic. I thought about it. Is it legal? Then did my homework and the more I dug the more ridiculous it seemed. I mean when you can by a multiregion player cheaper than my region locked one then you know it does not make any sense. He showed me the site ( http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mwill96/dvdunlocks4u.htm ) and before you can say dash my DVD won't play my Monty Python discs, I had confirmation that they had unlock instructions for the Sony AND the impossible Panasonic and they I am now happily watching the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Parrot Shop sketch. Indeed the ridiculousness of the region locking is straight out of a Python sketch, come to think of it. Perhaps they should reform and do the Region Lock sketch. The problem is that these restrictions are NOT funny.