Is film piracy as big a problem as it's made out to be?

iMax · 09-07-2011 08:35PM

The cinema only makes about €1.60 per ticket for the first couple of weeks of the movie. There's very little profit as it is. The admission price is dictated by the distributor not the cinema.

Cinemas are horribly expensive places to run as well, I know of one small chain who's electricity bill is an average of €48,000 a month per site. The projectors cost a fortune to run. Count in staff, insurance & other overheads & you'd wonder why anyone would want to be an exhibitor.

There was a lot more money to be made when they had exclusive rights to a film - this was done by bidding on the nut & phased out in the late 80s. The exhibitor would get a smaller percentage but would have exclusive rights to the movie for a fixed timeframe, so You'd HAVE to go to the Ambassador to see Star Wars, because they bid to take the lowest bite of the nut.

Jagle · 09-07-2011 09:28PM

Sad Professor wrote: »

Huh? Your attitude is rubbish. I don't care what you've copy and pasted from the Netflix site or Wikipedia or whatever. What I've read about Netflix online from people that use it is that quality can be very poor and fluctuates a lot depending on bandwidth. It will be great one day, but streaming just isn't there yet IMO.

id argue against you.

Ive used netflix and ive found it very good, what surprised my was a mod here making such a sweeping statement that netflix quality sucks. when it clearly doesnt, if they can broadcast, close to dvd/dvd/and hd quality content then clearly the issue is with peoples internet/bandwidth and not the content as it leaves netflix.

amacachi · 09-07-2011 09:36PM

PucaMama wrote: »

if they took less of a profit, we could pay less for tickets, but afford to go more often.

Exactly. I have to admit the local cinema is pretty reasonably priced and have very good offeres for unemployed people and students. Since they only lose (roughly) 40-50 cent per ticket by charging half the price it means that if 1 in 5 of those people buy a drink or about 1 in 15 buys food they've covered that initial "loss".

PucaMama · 09-07-2011 10:45PM

amacachi wrote: »

Exactly. I have to admit the local cinema is pretty reasonably priced and have very good offeres for unemployed people and students. Since they only lose (roughly) 40-50 cent per ticket by charging half the price it means that if 1 in 5 of those people buy a drink or about 1 in 15 buys food they've covered that initial "loss".

even if they had a single day in the week that they had the reduction on it would be good

Dman001 · 09-07-2011 11:27PM

iMax wrote: »

The cinema only makes about €1.60 per ticket for the first couple of weeks of the movie. There's very little profit as it is. The admission price is dictated by the distributor not the cinema.

Cinemas are horribly expensive places to run as well, I know of one small chain who's electricity bill is an average of €48,000 a month per site. The projectors cost a fortune to run. Count in staff, insurance & other overheads & you'd wonder why anyone would want to be an exhibitor.

There was a lot more money to be made when they had exclusive rights to a film - this was done by bidding on the nut & phased out in the late 80s. The exhibitor would get a smaller percentage but would have exclusive rights to the movie for a fixed timeframe, so You'd HAVE to go to the Ambassador to see Star Wars, because they bid to take the lowest bite of the nut.

This is the problem. I assume the distributor is often the Studios themselves? If they didn't demand such a huge percentage of the takings from a film, we could then see cheaper prices and a drop in Piracy. Instead, the insist on complaining about Piracy and make pathetic attempts to stop it.

iMax · 12-07-2011 11:06PM

Dman001 wrote: »

This is the problem. I assume the distributor is often the Studios themselves?

More often than not.

Dman001 wrote: »

If they didn't demand such a huge percentage of the takings from a film, we could then see cheaper prices and a drop in Piracy.

Films cost a lot of money to make & market. A studio normally has only four or five "tentpole" movies in a year that it makes a lot of money out of. The rest sometimes make money, sometimes not. The tentpoles allow the development of a broader range of movies. It's unlikely we would ever see a drop in piracy. If the price of admission was slashed, piracy would still grow because there is a segment of society who just want it free (or very cheap).

Dman001 wrote: »

Instead, the insist on complaining about Piracy and make pathetic attempts to stop it.

There's not a whole lot that can be done to prevent it, complaining (loudly) gets it to the forefront & reminds people that they can go see it in a really dark room with a huge screen & fantastic sound, Vs the "cam" (seriously, why bother?) they just downloaded.

A quick look at a popular site:

Rank	TOP 15 Torrents (Last 48 hours)	Seeders	Leechers	Peers	Comments
1	Ironclad 2011 BDRiP XViD-PSiG	5003	878	5881	270
2	True Blood S04E03 HDTV XviD-LOL	2629	62	2691	106
3	Alphas S01E01 Pilot HDTV XviD-FQM	1776	170	1946	35
4	Falling Skies S01E05 Silent Kill HDTV XviD-FQM	1893	31	1924	77
5	Weeds S07E03 HDTV XviD-FEVER	1494	46	1540	37
6	Top Gear S17E03 HDTV XviD-RiVER	1251	39	1290	48
7	Teen Wolf S01E07 Night School HDTV XviD-FQM	1154	84	1238	31
8	Warehouse 13 S03E01 The New Guy HDTV XviD-FQM	1197	62	1259	34
9	The Witches Of Oz 2011 R5 XviD-ViP3R	1068	161	1229	72
10	True Blood S04E03 720p HDTV X264-DIMENSION	1131	19	1150	39
11	Eureka S04E11 Liftoff HDTV XviD-FQM	1047	36	1083	34
12	Mr Poppers Penguins 2011 CAM READNFO XViD - IMAGiNE	920	96	1016	48
13	Bad Teacher 2011 TS XViD v2 - IMAGiNE	886	110	996	55
14	Falling Skies S01E05 720p HDTV x264-CTU	837	26	863	19
15	Leverage S04E03 The 15 Minutes Job HDTV XviD-FQM	729	19	748	22

eleven out of the top fifteen are TV series, which to me indicates a demand to view shows quicker than movies. Out of the remaining four movies, one is a TS, one is a cam, one is a R5 & one a BDRip.

Take "Bad Teacher" as an example. Probably the widest opening movie there, big cast, probably worldwide appeal, yet 886 people (on this site which claims a membership of approx. 1.2m) are willing to watch a shaky cam with ****ty sound. They were never going to go see it in the cinema. So if they weren't able to download it, they'd probably have bought a "silver" of it, which is actually more dangerous to the industry as they'd probably loan that to a bunch of people, whereas the digital copy will probably be deleted after viewing.

Fysh · 13-07-2011 10:11AM

iMax wrote: »

eleven out of the top fifteen are TV series, which to me indicates a demand to view shows quicker than movies. Out of the remaining four movies, one is a TS, one is a cam, one is a R5 & one a BDRip.

Take "Bad Teacher" as an example. Probably the widest opening movie there, big cast, probably worldwide appeal, yet 886 people (on this site which claims a membership of approx. 1.2m) are willing to watch a shaky cam with ****ty sound. They were never going to go see it in the cinema. So if they weren't able to download it, they'd probably have bought a "silver" of it, which is actually more dangerous to the industry as they'd probably loan that to a bunch of people, whereas the digital copy will probably be deleted after viewing.

The problem here is that the film industry is still trying to work an old paradigm that simply doesn't work any more. We have a communications network that's effectively worldwide and which forcibly makes obsolete concepts like enforced broadcast delays to maintain "exclusivity".

Bad Teacher is a film I've no interest in watching, but I can think of a half a dozen films that have come out this year that I would've paid maybe a fiver to see (eg The Mechanic), because they're watch-once-and-forget entertainment. I'm lucky - there's a cinema in central london (the Prince Charles) of which I'm a member whose entire model is to get in films a couple of months after they go on general release and screen them for cheap. Now, if the Prince Charles shut down tomorrow, I wouldn't suddenly start paying £12-15 to go and see The Mechanic, I just wouldn't watch it. The same goes for an awful lot of other films.

If film distributors offered legit limited streaming services on that same £3-5 price point, I'd be there with bells on. I would imagine a good number of current pirates would as well, given what research into the purchasing habits of downloaders has shown (ie people with money who download stuff a lot also spend considerably more than average on paying for stuff, whereas people with no money who download stuff don't spend money on paying for stuff because they have no money and were therefore never a prospective audience member to begin with). But until someone's willing to take our money, we can't give it to them...

iMax · 13-07-2011 10:23AM

Second run (& even third run) cinemas used to be extremely popular here right up until probably the early 80s. Outside Dublin, most cinemas were second run as it was cheaper to get the film (different nut ratios) & cheaper to get in. In addition, most films were exclusive in the Dublin cinema they ran in for several months, which meant the demand outside of the capital was there.

Factor in the international delay, Star Wars (my continuous point of reference), for example, opened in May 1977 in the US, January 1978 in the UK & June 1978 in Ireland (Ambassador Cinema). A full year after release for the print to reach Ireland, because of the geographic box office takes & lack of piracy, it was possible to re-use the original prints elsewhere (which had the added bonus of being cheaper to do).

They wouldn't work anymore to the same extent as they did because of piracy & demand.

For those interested in the development of multiplexes in Ireland or the history of the ambassador, here's a couple of articles my dad wrote for Box Office back in the late 90s.

Anyone interested in finding out what the longest playing movie in Dublin was ? Thank me & I'll tell you

sidekick! · 13-07-2011 07:04PM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

there is one film that hasn't been made in the 00's in the top 10. movies are making more money than ever. clearly they would be making more if downloading wasn't happening but they're doing just fine!

johnny_ultimate · 13-07-2011 09:58PM

sidekick! wrote: »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

there is one film that hasn't been made in the 00's in the top 10. movies are making more money than ever. clearly they would be making more if downloading wasn't happening but they're doing just fine!

The argument is much more complicated than that. As is regularly pointed out, the 2000 films are only the highest grossing because a) inflation and b) box office receipts are more accurate. The budget: profit ratio has also significantly disimproved. I'm not for a second disagreeing films ain't making enough money, but there's far more at play than that wikipedia list would suggest.

Dman001 · 14-07-2011 12:19AM

It could be argued that a lower ticket price would lead to a surge in Cinema-goers, therefore increasing Movie profits. If you could watch a film in the cinema for the same price as renting a DVD, I know what I'd pick!

iMax · 14-07-2011 12:36AM

Also, don't forget, Studios participate in what has become known as "Hollywood Accounting" which can turn a massively profit making production (tentpole) into a loss.

Only about 5% of movies officially show a net profit, and the "losers" include such blockbuster films as Rain Man (1988, Worldwide gross of $172,825,435 against a production cost of $25,000,000), Forrest Gump (1994, Worldwide gross of $329,694,499 against a production cost of $55,000000), and Batman (1989 Worldwide gross of $251,188,924 against a production cost of $35,000,000), Figures are box office & do not include video/DVD/BD, PPV & TV sales.

Hollywood accounting basically means that anything the studio takes a loss on that year can be offset against the income of a particular movie, so if as the writer of Forrest Gump found out when a movie set not connected to the film, but owned by Paramount in a different country burned down & was offset against the film. As a result, he won't sell the rights to "Gump & Son".