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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."
Well... since they have them beat on quantity, they must have them beat on quality.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
From the taking on titanic link: My guess is that at 8 per cent of the cost we can achieve 90 per cent of the production quality of any of their movies. The last mile will cost us more, given the current status of the technology available here-but even that we can achieve at, say, another 8 per cent. This is why Bollywood will ultimately fail. Sure, they have a bigger market, and they make more movies, but Hollywood knows the cost (and value) of western movies. The Indian distributers can flood Kazaa with as many Bollywood movies as they want, and they can expend that extra 8% of effort, but very few people in the west will spend money on this.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
The social differences in particular the lack of workforce desire to take risks will prevent India from achieving any type of superpower status. Until there is major cultural change in India the country isn't suited to be anything more than an outsourcing hub for the world.
India is not similar to the USA very much at all.
The British have not been the dam holding back the Indians from prosperity, Indian culture has been.
British rule did not stop Hong Kong Chinese or Aussies from prospering to second-world status. Israel was only formed recently, thanks to a British grant and UN intercession, yet is a world power today.
In an analogy to the formative USA, the denizens of India would be more suited, no irony intended, in the role of "Indian" as opposed to colonist.
The problems in India stem from its culture, not its past status as a colony.
For those of you not familiar with Bollywood flicks, you kind of have to watch them in a similar way you watch Hong Kong kung-fu flicks. You have similar cheeziness factors, recurring themes (boy meets/loses girl and singing and dancing in one, "you killed my father..." and fighting in the other), and so on. It's good fun actually...
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
It almost seems as though Bollywood's perception is that their core Indian market won't be affected by offering the movies online-the original article quotes something like 1 million out of 1 billion people in India have Internet access. So from their point of view, putting movies online can't really parasitize their existing market because it isn't connected. So they can only win-even if somebody finds a way around any protection on the movies, it still can only increase their customer base to reach people they haven't been able to in the past. In other words, even if only 1 out of 100 people actually buy the movie rather than watch any cracked version, that's still 1 more customer than they would have had otherwise.
In contrast, Hollywood seems to perceive their customers as more connected Internet-wise, and so putting movies online will parasitize their existing market. Using the same 1 out of 100 people idea, Hollywood sees it as losing 99 rather than gaining 1.
I'm not saying either or both is right or wrong, it just seems to me to be a difference in how each sees their core market.>> India won indipendence only 55 years ago, and is fast turning into an intelectual and finincial world power. They have a space program, nuclear wepons and huge investment from global companies such as IBM and Dell.
How does wasting the resources to acquire nuclear weapons help to become a intellectual or financial power ?
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Let me guess you were in the drama club. Probably got a dance routine to go along with it too.
- Toby
of course bollywood makes lots of different movies
but an indian can make fun of his nation's movie industry if he wants to, just like americans like to say hollywood is too liberal/ too gun crazy, when the truth is of course more complex
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ever look around and notice how many Indian folks there are in the US, working in Tech with access to the Internet?
Ever seen a Bollywood movie in a theater in the US?
Supply meets Demand and there are some people who like these movies here in the US where they can't (easily) see them in theaters.
I'm sure that lots of folks will take advantage if this if for no other reason than to have something from their culture for their children (born here) to watch.
Good luck to them!
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Yea, and than you have the Hollywood model
1. EXPLOSION!
2. GUN FIGHT!
3. Advertisement
4. EXPLOSION!
5. GUN FIGHT!
Its been pointed out that most readers of /. know nothing about Bollywood movies. Could some knowledgable people point out some links to reviews of Indian films that have subtitles or are in English?
I heard someone say, though I forget when and where, that if all stories are stripped of the particulars down to the abstract bone, there are about seven distinct story outlines. Total. In any culture.
Obviously, most of these were already explored by the ancient Greeks. Most likely even before that.
If we were to apply this outline to, say, the first Matrix movie, we'll get:
1. Neo meets Trinity
2. There's nothing going on at first (apparently)
3. Trinity remembers (or considers, or whatever) what the Oracle supposedly told her
4. Fight fight fight, shoot shoot shoot, techno techno techno
5. Circumstances (agents and stuff) intervene between N. and T. (i.e. morpheus, the father-figure, gets captured)
6. Big fights and all
7. N. finally wins over the matrix's evil underlords (the agents, again), comes back from the brain-dead and gets the girl
8. Everybody lives happily ever after.
See? It isn't that hard. Try the same for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet just for fun.
liberals hate guns
so it's a contraction i was trying to show: either hollywood is too liberal in which case there are no war movies, all problems are solved without violence, and no one carries a gun (not true at all), or it isn't liberal
so hollywood clearly is not liberal
hollywood is what it is: an industry maximized to project to americans what they want to see, so whatever you call hollywood is twisting the truth of what it is
you cannot blame hollywood for sex and violence in their films, you have to blame the amercian public: that's what they want to see, they vote with their pocketbooks
hollywood makes movies to make money, not political statements
you can't move into hollywood, change how it works, and suddenly change humanity. humanity is in control of hollywood through their pocket books, not vice versa.
but certain segments of society think they can control hollywood and therefore change ugly sides of humanity, because they think that hollywood is somehow in control of what people think. that's a logical fallacy of not understanding how the cause and effect relationship between the movie and the audience actually works.
conservatives complaing about the liberal media went out of vogue as soon as fox news grabbed ratings, so your complaint against "liberal" hollywood is outdated and contrived
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sure you haven't compared parts of chicago and new york ... We have great riches and great slums!!
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
The Bollywood industry doesn't produce classics, or certaily have failed to export them (although a small film maker like Ray managed it). Out of thousands and thousands of movies, how many do you know? And yet, I imagine you could name some French, Australian, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese movies.
This industry is more like the film making of Roger Corman - transient, fast buck making work.
I was told by someone from India that the main purpose of Bollywood is to sell music.
Also, in a culture where arranged marriage is almost always the case, the story is usually about finding true love.
So what Bollywood provides is catchy music and forbidden (fantasy) stories. That is what makes it popular some parts of the world, but probably not in the Western world.
Tired of the lack of decent domestic films, I've recently filled my Nexflix queue with foreign films. Apropos, just last night, my wife and I watched Sex and Lucia . We saw the unrated version, but had it been rated, I'm pretty sure it would have received a "X" rating in the US. I have no idea what rating it had in its country of origin (Spain?), but I imagine it would have been equivalent to the US's "R" rating. Having lived in Germany for a year in my youth, I know that Europeans have a much more balanced view of sexuality than most Americans.
The point is that while there was plenty of nudity and "graphic" sex (by US movie standards), it was presented so matter-of-factly, that it blended perfectly within the context of the film. Let's face it, people have sex, and they walk around naked (at times). In a US film, every furtive (or gratuitous) breast shot or sex scene is presented in such an eye-popping, oogling fashion, that you'd think such events were somehow not normal.
The filming was top-notch, and the story was quite the mind-bender. I highly recommend it. I just hope the rest of my non-domestic film rentals prove to be of such quality. BTW, can anyone recommend good films from Central and South America?
Method of processing duck feet
As a person of Indian origin who consumes the 10% of those 1000 Bollywood films that eventually do make it to the US market, and as someone who is acutely aware of Bollywood happenings on an almost day-to-day basis ( I must say the average Indian would easily fall into this category ), I think this is the right move.
Bollywood on P2P - way to go!
But why ?
1. The average expat Indian watches Bollywood purely out of nostalgia. There is a sense of loss in leaving one's home country & settling abroad, and Bollywood manages to help one cope with that loss rather effectively. P2P would cater to that segment quite nicely.
2. Despite this comment, Bollywood does large churn out pulp. Devdas & Lagaan are no different. At its core, Bollywood themes are hackneyed and trite - hero gets heroine, a couple of songs & dances, few mild conflicts ( mother-in-law versus bride, dad versus son, man versus the corrupt system, hero vs villian, etc ). So when you have a thousand of these made, year after year after year, you do have to wonder what happens to quality. Even as a fan of Bollywood, I'm not ashamed to claim that maybe 1, atmost 2 films per year, would make it to my DVD library. The rest are just fluff - to be consumed & discarded, like a can of pop. 2 out of 1000 films is 0.2%. That being the case, it seems almost criminal to waste the amount of resources needed to bring pulp onto the large screen on your local multiplex, and cause major traffic jams in local Indian hubs like Jersey City ( NJ ), Iselin ( NJ ), Flushing ( NY ) etc, where Indian communities hog the narrow arteries with their Toyotas blaring Bollywood songs as they head towards the latest Friday release, inconveniencing the local populace, not to mention the untold damage to cells in the cranium and the basal ganglia that get permanently damaged watching crap of this magnitude week after week on the large screen in surround sound. Its much better these Indians stay home and download these "Bollywood blockbusters" as they are known, on the DSL lines using P2P networks and watch themn on 15" laptops - saves gasoline for the commute, electicity needed to work the multiplex, and annoyance to local communities, plus hopefully a few brain cells.
3. Piracy is rampant among Indian film consumers - any video store in an Indian hub will sell you the latest Bollywood offering, pirated version, for $2. The industry loses a big chunk of change. Maybe P2P would pump some money back into the industry.
4. Mafia - Perhaps no industry is more tightly controlled by the underworld than Bollywood. Dons operating out of Dubai ( UAE ), South Africa, and Staten Island even, control the operation of the industry and screening of its films. P2P can subvert this whole criminal enterprise - finally technology beats the bad guys.
But, lets see if this actually takes off - efforts to reform Bollywood are few and far between, and get shut down rather suddenly - P2P may face the same fate.
I am an american, and I dont appreciate America giving aid to countries with questionable human rights records to further one agenda or the other (be it Israel over Palestine, Iraq n Turkey over the Kurds n Iran etc etc). Wish there was something I could do about where my tax dollars go, but since both the GOP n Dem's have the exact same policy ;)
That's not really correct. Yes, the decline of Europe worked in USA's favour. HOWEVER, USA was a superpower (when it comes to economics) in the LATE 1800's!!! People think USA was a superpower after WWWWII but that's not true. By the last 1800's USA already had a bigger GDP than any European country, including colonialists like Britain.
People fail to realize that USA became wealthy BEFORE it started practicing IMPERIALISM. If anything, US imperialism will be its downfall... USA probably has more enemies than anyone else in the world and this does not bode well for the country...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
May be because a studio gets only a few bucks profit on each disk, because the rest goes to greedy and inefficient distributors of physical goods? If a studio gets 5$ per disk and it can quadruple the sales by offering 2$ downloads, it might actually be worthwhile to ditch DVDs.
BTW, is anyone interested in setting up (a few thousand bucks investment needed) a commercial download service for public domain films (i.e. everything released before 1973)? There are places on this planet (like Russia), where copyright expires in 30 years and older works are in public domain (the fact is officially recognised by the Ministry of Culture).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.