Can movies be 'Napsterised'?
2003-10-31 14:16
Washington - Anything that can be digitised can be downloaded over the internet. And that, of course, goes for movies, as well - a problem that now has many movie industry watchers and executives scurrying to try to address before billions of dollars are lost to piracy.
The music industry is still reeling from the realisation that its products can be pirated and downloaded with relative ease. Can movies suffer the same fate?
The answer is "yes", but with some qualifications. A recent study on the subject by Boston-based Forrester Research found that 20% of US consumers from the ages of 12 - 22 have already downloaded movies illegally from the internet at least once.
"There's no evidence, though, that movie piracy at current levels is having any effect on movie attendance or movie sales," Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester, says.
Obstacles
That's because for most people, even if they could get past the idea that downloading movies is an infringement of copyright law and therefore illegal in most countries, significant practical obstacles exist that make downloading and making copies of movies much more cumbersome - at least for now.
There's the bandwidth issue. The typical two-hour movie consists of several gigabytes of data, versus a few megabytes for your average digitised song.
That means that even with a fast internet connection, your patience will be tried. In addition, it's not self-evident where you can go to find movies to download. Although instructions on downloading and locating movies online certainly exist for the determined.
On top of all that, says Bernoff, there are "quality problems as well". The data that makes up a digitised movie must be compressed, and depending upon the compression level, the final quality of the film can be grainy and unsatisfactory.
Finally, Bernoff adds, many people like to view movies on their living room DVDs. That involves transferring a digitised version of the movie to a DVD, which is both a lengthy process and costly.
Technological advances
But many of the current obstacles to would-be movie pirates will be eliminated by technological advances in the months and years to come.
"People will find a way to download movies just like music," predicts Ron Grover, media analyst for US-based BusinessWeek.
That's no doubt why the movie industry is taking the downloading threat seriously. In the US, some theatres have begun airing "public service announcements" regarding piracy before movies begin.
"Executives in the movie industry have a concern bordering on panic," says Bernoff.
That's a good thing, industry watchers believe. The music industry, they say, was comparatively slow to address the threat of music piracy, to the point where now the primary weapon against music piracy appears to be the threat of legal action against violators. - Sapa-DPA
- SAPA