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Paramount Pictures To Release Film On Bittorrent
TheyreNotTheir writes "In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie The Tunnel will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie – which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia – will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures."
Smart money says people still end up in court being sued for distributing it anyway.
The question now is whether the film will be leaked onto Bittorrent before the official Bittorrent release.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
A lot of people (claim?) to buy games/movies/software after "trying them out" from bit torrent downloads.
This will be an interesting business model test.
Same thing I'm wondering. I'm immensely glad a company finally has the foresight to at least give it a try.
Donate and or buy it if you like it , they're testing new grounds and we need to prove we're not hypocrites.
The slashdot crowd seems to follow the "try before you buy" mentality , so if you end up enjoying the movie , put your money were your mouth is.
Hasnt the Humble Indie Bundle already done this??
1. Make film
2. Put crappy divx on torrent.
3. Put superior dvd on sales.
Guess which version will be more popular...
BTW.. Next blockbuster might follow old Theathe -> rental -> DVD -> cable tv -> public tv model again....
Last time I saw a trailer for this, it looked ridiculous. With a rather small production budget too, it's being set up to fail. "Waaah, when we do what the pirates want, they still won't make us money!"
Of course I won't. I don't have a habit of buying inferior products over an inferior mechanism, so why do they expect visa-versa?
Monday... no peers, no seeds. I'm still stuck at 76.4%. The days drag on, and I can't help but wonder: where is my data and why is it taking so long to get here? Could there be some evil force keeping me from my mission? Am I in danger? I can only hope that one day, the bits will flow... like a torrent...
*dramatic music*
*man casually walks away from a giant explosion without looking back at it*
BitTorrent: The Movie
Coming Summer 2012
Working...
Release a bad movie as an experiment.
Watch nobody buy it because it sucks.
Point and shout "You see? Nobody will buy this stuff without restrictive copyright law!!!!"
--- tracer.ca
It's a good idea, but if they really wanted to see if it works then they would release a film with some big-name actors. This just looks like some B-movie pseudo-thriller.
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I bought twenty-five frames quite awhile ago now, anyone else?
What would be clever is releasing the Divx on a torrent, but making the torren pan-and-scan and standard def, mono audio, burned in French subtitles, and corrupt the datastream a little so that every few minutes the picture hangs. Such a torrent might be "good enough" for people that wanted to casually watch the movie, and would divert them from a better pirated copies, particularly if you made sure it was very easy to find, but would be unacceptable if you actually wanted to enjoy watching the movie, and would stimulate you to go buy the real one.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
No. The Humble Indie Bundle on bittorrent was just regular piracy. Of course it was only pirated because of the invasiveness of its non-existant DRM and its outrageous price of a whole dollar.
The summary is incredibly misleading, I think. It's not a trick, it's not a trap. Ackbar lied to you.
What's happening is, the creators of the movie (who have always planned on releasing their movie on torrent) now also have a 'hard copy' DVD release planned. The DVD release is being distributed by Paramount HE, but it still seems quite clear that the rights are held by the movie creators, not the distributors as is usually the case. This is similar with what Paley did with Sita Sings the Blues, and it's a Good Thing (TM).
If you people can now stop speculating and go support this initiative, it would be great!!
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if rather than fighting this around the world that they will succumb to blatant product placement throughout the movie. Look for lots of Coke cans, iPhones, laptops of a certain variety, certain car manufacture with logo prominent, etc...
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
This is the first time I've ever asked for Slashdot to dupe a story.
But, post this again, in 60 days, when the movie is out so I can get it.
Reeses
I don't think so. Part of the reason people elect to not "go buy the real one" is because "the real one" has built up a reputation for not being as good as the pirate releases. If the torrent is pan-and-scan and has burned-in French subtitles and corruption, people seeing it will think, "Damn, the DVD must have been really bad for the cleaned up and improved version to be as bad as this."
What they ought to be doing, is skip the bittorrent release altogether, but also skip the DVD (offer a for-pay download instead, and in a normal file format+codec and not requiring a specialized client (e.g. iTunes)). Or at least make sure the DVD release doesn't use CSS. Remove all the reasons that people pirate, and publicize like crazy that they've done this. (A lot of people are in the habit of pirating everything, because it's just assumed that all the non-pirate releases have DRM problems, so people working to fix the problem really do need to make a lot of noise, to get people to take the idea of non-piracy seriously again.) They should still go for getting money, but just make sure that a pirate release has no chance of being better than their own product.
Any release of a "crippled" product (whether a corrupt datastream, or Bluray DRM, or whatever) is just a way of telling people to go get the movie from pirates. That gets the publisher out of the loop and pretty much eliminates and chances of collecting revenue. The publisher should try to be the best go-to guy, or at least tied for best. Never ever tell potential customers to go somewhere else.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Yeah, using laziness or "my time is precious" as the reason to not bittorrent, is really weird. There are reasons not to bittorrent, but saving time or effort ain't among them. Nothing is as easy and point-and-click. All I can think of, is that this person's computer is hard-to-use, or he doesn't have an HTPC yet.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I think -you're- missing the point. Everything you say is correct, but what's to stop the studio from crying piracy anyway. Silly old things like facts?
So when the same torrent is indexed by numerous sites out there, it suddenly becomes illegitimate, because the user clicked on it through an indexer rather than directly through the site? It's the same content from the same source, either way. You just got the index from a different location. How is it suddenly illegitimate if you ran across it on piratebay, if the tracker inside the torrent is the legitimate server in the first place? Unless they're somehow going to turn it into a private tracker that you have to have an account for before downloading the file via their own bit torrent service (which wouldn't surprise me) so they could lock it down from those who aren't connecting to the tracker with a passkey.
If they want to make this experiment real, DVD as the only source of payments is a huge mistake. They need a theatrical release AND a simple donation system along with DVD release, all from day one. They'll learn that:
I'd consider experimentally pre-releasing several, if not all, films on bittorrent for free. With a minor twist: they'd all be 80% of the screened version, that is, without the happy ending :-)