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

Bollywood

[Esion Modnar]

Well... since they have them beat on quantity, they must have them beat on quality.

Do demographics factor in?

[Helmholtz Coil]

I wonder if maybe one factor driving their decision was demographics, or the perceptions of demographics.

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.

Re:C'mon you KNOW you were thinking of this....

[TobyWong]

Let me guess you were in the drama club. Probably got a dance routine to go along with it too.

it was a joke

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:Bad plots

[dema]

Yea, and than you have the Hollywood model

1. EXPLOSION!
2. GUN FIGHT!
3. Advertisement
4. EXPLOSION!
5. GUN FIGHT!

the outdated stereotype of liberals in hollywood

[circletimessquare]

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