Bollywood Embraces Kazaa Movie Downloads

MaximusTheGreat writes "While Hollywood tries to debate how to tackle P2P movie downloads, Bollywood the world's largest film industry has decided to embrace it. This could usher in a new era of legal movie downloads like iTunes for music, as Bollywood, the Indian film industry produces 1000 movies a year and outstrips hollywood by almost 3:1. Theaters worldwide sold some 3.6 billion tickets to Bollywood films last year, compared with Hollywood's 2.6 billion. In revenue terms Bollywood is already larger than the British, Hong Kong, Japanese and Italian movie industry and is growing at a very fast rate."

Comments

Re:my roommate in college

[mirko]

He obviously has not seen

• Devdas (modern Romeo&Juliet like),
• Lagaan(cricket against the Brits)
• nor even Monsoon wedding (she prepairs to get married with a guy she doesn't know)...
• 
  Where are the testosteroned rivals, here ?

Only one problem

[arvindn]

(I'm Indian) I read about this a couple of weeks back. Apparently the number of downloads was 200. Not surprising: internet availability among home users is ridiculously low in India, 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband. Its increasing, but slowly.

But on the other hand maybe movie distribution will become the killer app for broadband in India :)

The article is misleading.

[karmaflux]

"India produces as many as 1,000 movies each year with revenues of more than $1 billion." -- The Globe and Mail
This indicates revenue of a million a movie; that's a paltry sum which no American movie house would bother with.

"Bollywood's global annual revenues, estimated at $1.3 billion this year, are small change compared with Hollywood's $51 billion." --Business Week
This shoots down the other misdirection in the article. Sell all the tickets you want, Bollywood. You're still pulling less than 1/39th the cash that Hollywood takes in.

A lot of people watch these movies. I have seen a few. To a film, they were insipid. Do yourselves a favor and avoid the musicals at all costs.
But don't worry. They're not going to take over the film industry.

Re:India

[Frymaster]

Israel was only formed recently, thanks to a British grant and UN intercession, yet is a world power today.

israel is a "world power" because it is completely propped up with american handouts. the state of israel is the single biggest recipient of american foreign aid. thrity per cent of all u.s. foreign aid money goes there. thirty percent! that's $3billion a year.

not hard to be a "world power" with those kinds of freebies.

oh yeah, here's my source... and here and here