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February 26, 2005
I'll bet anything unlimited rental passes have impacted piracy.
My reasoning is based on my own experience - I couldn't afford constant rentals at $4 a pop, nor frequent theater visits, and obviously not blind buys, so I'd download something to see if I'd like it before plunking down the cash. And if I didn't - I'd just free up the space on my hard drive and skip on to the next.
The quality was often horrible, particularly for the ones that clearly came from digicams held within theaters. And downloading took forever, and often you'd complete a download that could've taken a few days only to find out it was dubbed in a foreign language, or was the wrong film altogether. But it's what you do when you can't afford blowing wads of cash on movies.
Incidentally, anyone who actually believes that downloading in any way cuts into profits of more legitimate means (theatrical viewing and DVD release) is smoking crack.
Now I simply go to my local video store and grab anything I want off the shelf (2 at a time) and give it a try. If I don't like it, I shut it off, and back to the video store - a lot less time wasted than on downloading. I personally don't really have a reason to download anymore.
The downloading that occurs due to the films not being available will continue for many, as it should. (I doubt I'll do it because if it's hard to get a film - there are 30,000 others I haven't seen I can more easily check out.) There's no reason people should be deprived of a film experience just because the distributors are screwing off and not releasing a film for an extended, ridiculous amount of time - two examples that come to mind are Battle Royale (2000) and A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), which as of this writing are still not available to purchase in the USA. One that wasn't available for a long time except by illegitimate download was City of God (2002), which wasn't available to purchase within the USA until June 2004.
Posted by astor at February 26, 2005 10:15 PM