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New Piracy Loss Estimate
An anonymous reader writes "WSJ reports on a new MPAA estimate losses due to piracy. "The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years."
Actually, no it doesn't make the assumption that every pirated copy of a movie would be a sale. If you RTFA, you would see:
The results are likely still completely bogus, but at least they pretended to be correcting for that factor.
theatre in 2 years, haven't bought any recent films on DVD in at least as long and dropped my NetFlix rental plan to the "cheapo" plan as well. They aren't losing money due to piracy, they haven't released anything I would waste my bandwidth on. They are losing money because they release trash; bad "popcorn" flicks, weak remakes that bear little resemblance to their predecessors, bubble gum movies with pop stars who act worse than they lip synch,etc.. You can blame piracy for a while longer, but eventually the problem will become obvious to even the most oblivious film studio executive.
Remove the warning, remove the ads, charge $10 max. I can live without movies if you force me to.
Yeah, tell me about it. I popped in a DVD a couple months back and it was crammed with plugs for upcoming movies, which came out some time back when the DVD was issued, and I couldn't fast-forward, skip to menu or anything. What a bunch of low-life ****ers.
I did eventually figure out I could hold down the menu button and start the DVD and it would actually skip to the menu, but some disks don't allow that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
is there any reason at all that anybody should be taking these numbers seriously?
If they come stapled to a $6.1 billion check made out to cash and slipped under the back door of the Captiol Building?
KFG
Ok, here's how I look at it. The RIAA/MPAA (personally,they are both the same bunch of idiots) calculate that if they released X number of movies/CD's in a year and sold every one of them, they should have made X number of dollars. Now at the end of the year, they only sold Y amount, therefore, they "lost" 6.1 billion. Of course, they don't take in consideration that NO ONE IS BUYING THEIR CRAP because for the last few years, they haven't produced/released anything anyone wants to buy!
With 1.3 billion dollars, the MPAA could afford...
Badass Resumes
It's a good thing the Arctic Monkeys are RIAA free. They belong to the "Domino" label which doesn't subscribe to the RIAA's foolishness.
I'm not trying to make people mad; I'm trying to make people think!
Given ever increasing taxation and general cost of living, there's only so much money to go into the 'home entertainment' pot each month.
That pot is shared between DVDs, CDs, games and books.
There's only so much money, so I'll buy the best of each category and leave the 'good, but not great' until it is on sale, or just download it if I have the time to watch it.
So they wouldn't get any extra money in total if I didn't pirate it (how long until they count going around to a friend's house and watching a film with them as piracy?), and any loss isn't at full retail price, but at bargain sale price.
On the other hand I have bought CDs based upon downloading the music and liking the band. That music sale could have been a DVD sale, game sale or wine sale, the total money spent isn't increasing because I don't have that extra money to spend, but at least I could spend it better.