Hollywood Studios Fuming Over Indie Studio Deal With BitTorrent

silentbrad sends this quote from TheWrap: "'It's a deal with the devil,' one studio executive [said]. 'Cinedigm is being used as their pawn.' Cinedigm announced this weekend that it would offer the first seven minutes of the Emily Blunt-Colin Firth indie Arthur Newman exclusively to BitTorrent users, which number up to 170 million people.... Hollywood studios have spent years and many millions of dollars to protect their intellectual property and worry that by teaming up with BitTorrent, Cinedigm has embraced a company that imperils the financial underpinnings of the film business and should be kept at arm's length. 'It's great for BitTorrent and disingenuous of Cinedigm,' said the executive. 'The fact of the matter is BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of the industry.' Other executives including at Warner Brothers and Sony echoed those comments, fretting that Cinedigm had unwittingly opened a Pandora's box in a bid to get attention for its low-budget release. ... 'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said. 'How people use it can be positive for the industry or it can hurt the industry. We want it help us make this indie film successful.' ... 'We'll be working with all of [the studios] one day,' [Matt Mason, BitTorrent's vice president of marketing] said. 'It's really up to them how quickly they come to the table and realize we're not the villain, we're the heroes.'"

Comments

Re:Indie - pendent

[iluvcapra]

Champions of "indie" cinema take note: Cinedigm is simply a production/distribution division of Technicolor, (yes that Technicolor), a multi-billion dollar Hollywood production service company that operates as a vendor to all the Hollywood studios. Several of the producers have ongoing relationships with Technicolor and Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal, which is handling distribution of the film in several foreign territories. Cinedigm is the US film and animation industries.

This entire thing is just Technicolor putting up a tiny film, probably entirely produced with UK Lottery Fund money and North Carolina tax credits, as a stalking horse/advertising experiment. The film has no stars to speak of, it was probably going to die an unlamented death on pay-per-view before they upgraded their marketing campaign to full Viral mode.

Re:and WHO are the movie studios in it for, us?

[Rinikusu]

As an aspiring independent filmmaker, it's not really as bad as you make it out to be. There are very affordable indie-extremely-low-budget rates for us, and waivers and what not that can be had. Film permits, on the other hand...