…for having so much tax. EVERY SINGLE media product - CDs, DVDs, BluRay discs, HDDVDs…everything, is so much cheaper on Amazon in the US then it is here in the UK. For example. All four moves of Harry Potter on BluRay will set you back $61 USD less if you buy it from the US instead of here. You even get a proper fancy cover for all the discs if you get it from there. Here, you have to buy each one separately.

Lost Season 3. It’s actually cheaper for me to get it on BluRay from the US and ship it here then it is for me to buy the standard DVD here. What the hell. Seriously. It’s insane.

The worst thing is, I would buy it all from the US, except for one major issue: region coding. It’s a lot better with BluRay (only three regions), but the US is still a different region from the UK. I don’t get the point of that either. That was originally meant to stop people exporting DVDs from the US to other countries before the DVD came out there…however, I’ve noticed that BluRay releases here are coming about a month earlier then the US release. For example, Harry Potter is out here, I think, this coming Monday (12th Nov), yet it’s only out in December in the US. Same with Die Hard 4 (already out here, not yet out in the US), and many other titles.

Of course, if I got an HDDVD player (another example - you can get an HDDVD player in the US for under $100 now. They’re still over £200/300 here), I would be able to buy ALL my HDDVDs from the US because 1) they’re a heck of a lot cheaper, and 2) no region coding!

Anyway…the point of this post, basically, is to say how stupid the current system is. And it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault. Mainly cos I hate him because he’s fat and ugly and does a horrible job at running this country.