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

my roommate in college

[circletimessquare]

from new dehli, said every bollywood movie has the same plot:

2 boys, separated at birth, fall in love with the same woman, except one is rich/ powerful/ a cop and the other is poor/ a farmer/ a thief... they fight each other for the woman, and there is much singing and dancing throughout

he said that is basically every movie made in bollywood ;-P

Re:India

[cygnusx]

I think in another 50 years that India will be beside the US in terms of being a world superpower. In a hundred it will be the most powerful nation in the world

Not unless they figure out how to think as one nation instead of several chauvinistic states. Oh, and get rid of the pork-bellied ruling class that has held the country back so far.

This won't work

[andy1307]

AS any ethnic Indian living in the US will tell you, you can walk into an Indian grocery store and rent a pirated video cassette for the latest Bollywood flock for 2$ or less. This way, people can watch the movie on their big screen TVs instead of waiting for the movie to download and then watching it on your computer.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea...I'm just saying it won't work with Bollywood movies.

Finally someone understands

[mr_lithic]

The main driver behind P2P downloading is not price. It is availability.

Here is a thriving industry (The Indian and Pakistani film groups) offering their goods online to make them available to those who live in geographical areas that would not normally be accessible. It eliminates videotape piracy which is rampant in this marketplace and allows fans access to the content. Why have the Bollywood chiefs picked this up and the American and British Music Industry dropped the ball. Was it pressure from their distributors? Lack of knowledge of the internet? No method of micropayments?

I would really like to know why it took a hardware manufacturer to bring in a system of legal digital content delivery (Apple and iTunes).

It also is good to see one of the largest and most productive media producers embracing digital video distribution. This completely jumps the gun on Hollywood and leaves the North American producers playing catch-up.

Re:Do demographics factor in?

[weetjerm]

Demographics are a huge part of Bollywood, if not everything in India. Like everything else, shows in the theater break down among class and wealth lines.

For the lower class, movie tickets are dirt cheap. But this cheap ticket gets you standing room only, right in front of the screen, with thousands of other cheap ticket holders.

If you can afford it, expensive tickets land you a seat in the balcony, where you don't have to rub elbows with everyone else.

By this design, the movies are more of a social gathering than a film experience. Numerous comments have mentioned how every Bollywood film is the same plot. This is true, because nobody cares about the movies that much. As long as there is song/dance, it makes good background noise for socialization.

Because films are already necessarily cheap, and the films themselves are not very meaningful, I doubt the Indian movie industry has much to lose from Kazaa. This is only good news for the US, as it is yet another sign that Hollywood is quite broken.