Does Online Movie Downloads Mean The End Of The Video Store?

When a London company announced several years ago that it was offering the first

legal service to Watch Vampires Suck Movie for Free, video store owners around the world began worrying about their future.

Downloading services today are marketing to the very kind of person who used to drive to Blockbuster or Movie Gallery twice a week. After all, DVD and VHS renting is a massive market. Here's a prediction: major film studio will eventually have their own online downloading services. Dumping movies into your home computers is going to be massive.

Legal movie downloading companies say they are aiming for the very customer who frequents the corner video store. Indeed, VHS and DVD rental is a massive market worldwide. Movie marketers today schedule not only the first-run release of each new movie these days, but also when it will be released in second-run theaters, then how and when it will hit foreign cinemas, then when the film will become available on DVD and when it will go to HBO, Starz, Showtime and other cable outlets. Now stir in one more possibility -- home download release. What once was illegal has become a viable marketplace.

Yes, when downloading movies first began, doing so was illegal. The U.S. Movie industry lost an estimated $2.3 billion annually in revenue to internet pirates just a few years ago. Hollywood's total annual income that year was estimated to be just under $45 billion. So, it should be obvious why Hollywood is harnessing its own download possibilities.

However, uploading the film and downloading it onto home computers are crimes. Hollywood lost an estimated $2.3 billion to internet piracy just a few years ago. Another $3.8 billion was lost to bootlegged DVDs and other "hard goods" piracy that same year. Hollywood's total annual income that year was estimated to be just under $45 billion. So, with $6.2 million slipping through their fingers it should not be surprising that the movie industry is battling piracy with increasing vigor. Some would say China is the capital of movie piracy. Indeed, within hours of a film being released nationwide in the U. S., illegal DVD copies are available on the street in Shanghai and Beijing. About 90 percent of DVDs sold in China are bootlegged. However, Hollywood reports that it even loses even more money because of internet piracy in North America and Europe.

Yet does online piracy really endanger Hollywood? A very good case can be made that pirates fill a gap overseas where legitimate markets are heavily restricted by repressive regimes -- such as in the Islamic Republic of Iran where every movie must be approved by the religious morals police. The People's Republic of China sets quotas of the number of movies allowed into the country -- and frequently blocks any film that is critical of China's dictatorial leaders. So a case could be made that Iranian and Chinese pirates are actually busting their government's blockade on "dangerous" ideas such as freedom of speech or the right to elect one's own leaders.

Some of the world's biggest DVD-counterfeiters are in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. One DVD mill near Manila was cranking out 14 million DVDs annually. Indeed, bootlegged DVDs traceable to China have been identified in at least 25 countries. So it will be with downloadable movies. Already a Sweden-based site functions much like Google, listing movies that are illegally available for free download. In a recent visit to that site, investigators found more than 5 million users online, trading illegally copied films.

Some of the planet's biggest DVD counterfeiters are in China -- whose bootlegged discs have been identified in more than 25 nations worldwide. You can expect these same pirates to exploit the internet. But Hollywood would be smart to study their successes and figure out how customers wanting to Download Vampires Suck Movie Online for Free can make moviemakers a lot of money.

by: Nichola Smithson

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