I love Aro Video and – as an Aro Valley resident myself – regularly borrow films from their store. However, I’m concerned that their recent campaign for censorship reform is cloaking what is primarily an economic challenge for small New Zealand businesses in social/moral rhetoric and emotive language.

Maybe that’s too harsh, I’m sure that is not their intent – but I do think it is interesting to see how economic and social issues collide (jostle for position?) around this issue.

Here’s what I understand, in simple terms:

• Films must display a New Zealand classification to be sold here.
• Films are classified in New Zealand when, before they are supplied to the public, “someone” submits it to the OFLC and pays a fee.
• Most of the time, this “someone” is a big fancy distributor to whom $1100 is not much more than a drop in the bucket. (When you’re looking at millions in Kill Bill sales, $1100 is nothing to get an R18 classification and sticker for your ultra-violent film so that sensible adults can buy it in New Zealand.)
• But big distributors only tend to import and stock what the “mainstream” watch and play. So when it comes to alternative titles – media consumed by smaller groups of the New Zealand population – noone is there to pay this fee.
• Because there are also less people to buy these alternative titles, less units are likely to be sold in New Zealand, meaning that the amount of profit to made from stocking these titles is far less, especially when you take into account that you’ll also have to foot the bill for $1100 to stock it in the first place.
• When you are a small store like Aro Video, and you have built your reputation on being able to find ‘just about anything’ for your customers, this can pose a bit of a problem. If you have to pay a classification fee on top of the cost of importing just one copy of a DVD for a keen customer, you are likely to lose money, not make it. Aro says they provide “a comprehensive choice of contemporary, classic and curious cinema including a significant selection of exclusive titles” – they trade off this reputation.

Now, here is where it starts to get interesting:

It isn’t illegal to own, and have in your own home, media that hasn’t been classified yet in New Zealand (as long as it’s not got content considered to be “objectionable” under NZ law). This means that, if you’re unable to find what you are looking for at a local retailer, you are able to go online and buy from online retailers located overseas, and have the item shipped here – direct to you.

The second interesting thing, I think, is that this is essentially what Aro Video was doing in the first place – in the past, when you asked them to find something you couldn’t find anywhere else in New Zealand, they would contact their overseas suppliers and purchase the item… but they would then sell it to you (with NZ label) over the counter.

These days, Aro Video finds itself getting “scooped” by online retailers like Amazon, because consumers can go direct to overseas suppliers, via sophisticated tools that aggregate together a great many of these different suppliers at once.

Thanks to the internet – everyone is suddenly able to see this network of suppliers, and import whatever we want to watch in our own homes!

So, this issue seems – at least to me – to be, not actually about “shortening the ‘long tail’ of consumer choice”… but rather about how free international trade is impacting on small New Zealand businesses…

It is also interesting to note that Aro Video is making money this way as well, their website states that they “also welcome international orders, so no matter where you are in the world, you can order (and even pre-order) films to buy from the website”.

It does seem to me that it might be easier for Aro Video to blame New Zealand Censorship law for being unable to obtain material, than to admit that they can’t afford to acquire and process everything that their ‘long tail’ customers ask for.

Perhaps part of the business model of an ‘alternative’ video store involves taking a financial hit on the import of rare titles in order to keep a reputation of being able to ‘find anything’. How much can you pass these expenses on to the customer? (After all, Aro Video is only $1 more expensive for a ‘general release’  than Video Ezy Wellington – would we pay more for a wider range of local rentals?)

Furthermore, it’s not quite as devastating as it sounds:

• This economic problem only applies to a very small section of films. A lot of ‘non-mainstream’ titles are traditionally brought into NZ through film festivals. Film festivals get a waiver of up to 75% of the classification fee, and this fee is fronted by the film festival organizers (this may be why film festival tickets are slightly more expensive than ordinary cinema tickets), not by retailers/rental stores.
• Much of the films brought into New Zealand may be cross-rated from Australia and the UK, meaning they don’t have to go through the OFLC, and may just ‘adopt’ our stickers. (Cross rating isn’t the be-all and end-all: if we’d followed Australia’s classification system to the letter, we’d have censored a lot more video games last year. Thankfully, our censors still look at the higher rated items, to classify them R18 so Adults can still access them even if Australia or the UK bans them).
• Many of the items Aro Video lists as unavailable actually have been previously classified in New Zealand, and are in fact available for import. Some of the list are banned due to objectionable content.

In a recent article in the Capital Times, Bill Hastings (New Zealand’s Cheif Censor) spoke about some of the issues. I was interested in his call to the video rental industry: “I would say New Zealand is missing out because the video shop industry is not being sufficiently creative in being co-operative… Why don’t these guys get together and jointly pay the waived classification fee for the title of a DVD, and then they can import as many as they want – they’d just have to pay the small amount for the classification sticker on each DVD.”

I can see, though, why this would be difficult to implement. Why would video stores, currently in competition with each other for customers, agree to collaborate? If other stores start stocking these hard-to-get items, won’t Aro Video lose its great reputation?

As a librarian, my personal view is that the onus is instead on cultural heritage institutions (particularly university libraries, where ‘works of cultural merit’ are concerned, but also public libraries) to band together and bear some of the cost of classification on the part of the public. I was quite surprised to see several Victoria University Librarians complaining, in the comments of the Lumiere blog post, that classification was “prohibitive” to their collections. (My recollection was that Victoria was considering collaborating with other university libraries to get their collections classified.)

I think that librarians (and New Zealand retailers too) have an obligation, as people who care about creative media, to promote public awareness, and support the process of classification… in order to protect access to these materials and future creative works. I think we’re fortunate to have an established system in New Zealand that looks independently and critically at what the appropriate audience is for material, as opposed to just banning it outright based on moral panic.