If You Download Movies Online, Are Rental Stores Doomed?
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When a London company announced several years ago that it was offering the first legal service to Download Vampires Suck Movie Online Free, video store owners around the world began worrying about their future.
Why, after all, would customers leave the comfort of their home to wander through a store to study video covers when anybody can do the same thing at their home keyboard? Why go out into the rain or snow or summer's heat when everything's available -- legally -- at the click of a mouse?
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.
Just a few months ago, somebody sitting at their home computer uploaded a high-quality copy of a newly released film onto a certain illegal person-to-person file-sharing network. Within weeks, that one file had been downloaded by 30,408 people on six continents. Dozens of other illegal copies of the movie found their way onto the hard drives of many thousands more.
Today 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 bootlegs, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Why? Because China puts quotas on the number of foreign films allowed into the country -- and carefully screens them, making sure nothing gets in that would spread dangerous ideas such as free speech or democracy. In Iran, every film must pass approval by Muslim morals police. The same restrictions apply in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Islamic world. And in Burma, Cuba and North Korea. So in each of those nations, movie pirates are feeding a hunger for freedom that dictators have tried to quash.
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 for Free can make moviemakers a lot of money.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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