Monday, August 30, 2010

If You Download Resident Evil Afterlife Movie Free Online, Are Video Stores Doomed?

By Eric Newman

When a London company announced several years ago that it was offering the first legal service to Download Resident Evil Afterlife 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 studios will eventually have their own online downloading services. Dumping movies into your home computers is going to be massive.

And here's another prediction: the illegal download sites will boom as well. Why not download for free? One major reason is that it's illegal. Law enforcement made very public examples of a number of illegal music downloaders several years ago. Do you really want to see your name in the headlines? Terrible quality is another reason. Viruses are also common with free online movie downloads. The jerks that create viruses have to dream up clever ways to spread them.

Hollywood lost about $2.3 billion in revenue to internet pirates a few years ago. The total annual income of the big studios that year was just under $45 billion. So, it should be no surprise that Hollywood is battling internet movie piracy with gusto.

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.

Pirate successes are worth careful study. They do point to untapped opportunity. Not so many years ago, Hollywood actually fought the idea of marketing videotaped movies. The big studios feared that people would stay at home rather than go to their local cinema. They were wrong, however. Home viewing has expanded Hollywood's reach. Today many new releases are never screened at a theater, but instead go directly to home video.

Studios will be smart to continue embracing technologies that empower the public to Download Resident Evil Afterlife Movie for Free sitting in their easy chair, barefoot and in their pyjamas - without ever leaving home. - 40728

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