Region codes

Region codes
Regions for Blu-ray standard A: Americas; East and Southeast Asia; U.S. territories; Bermuda. B: Africa, Europe, Oceania; Middle East; Kingdom of the Netherlands; British overseas territories, French territories; Greenland. C: Central and South Asia; Mongolia, Russia, and People's Republic of China.
Regions for Blu-ray standard[43]
A: Americas; East and Southeast Asia; U.S. territories; Bermuda. B: Africa, Europe, Oceania; Middle East; Kingdom of the Netherlands; British overseas territories, French territories; Greenland. C: Central and South Asia; Mongolia, Russia, and People's Republic of China.

Blu-ray Discs may be encoded with a region code, intended to restrict the area of the world in which they can be played, similar in principle to the DVD region codes, although the used geographical regions differ. Blu-ray Disc players sold in a certain region may only play discs encoded for that region. The purpose of this system is to allow motion picture studios to control the various aspects of a release (including content, date, and in particular price) according to the region. Discs may also be produced without region coding, so they can be played on all devices.

This places the countries of the major Blu-ray manufacturers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia) in the same region as North America. As of early 2008, about two-thirds of all released discs were region-free.[44]

In the Blu-ray region coding system, the United States is placed in region A while regions B and C are used for countries which can experience localization delays before U.S. titles are officially released. The opposite, though, is sometimes true and a few new titles such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Running Scared were released in certain European countries before the U.S. release.[45] In response to the DVD region system, multi-region and region-free DVD players became dominant in certain markets; certain Blu-ray player models have been modified to allow for playback of Blu-ray discs from Regions A and B and DVD discs from Regions 1 and 2.[