Economist: File Sharing's Impact On Movies Is Modest At Most

First time accepted submitter SillyBoy123 writes What is the impact of file sharing releases on the movie industry? Ask the studios and they will say billions. An economist named Koleman Strumph is presenting a paper at the National Bureau of Economics this week that tries to estimate the crowd out from these releases. His conclusion: "I find that file sharing has only a modest impact on box office revenue." In fact, Strumph finds that file sharing before the official release of a movie can actually be beneficial to revenues: "One consistent result is that file sharing arrivals shortly before the theatrical opening have a modest positive effect on box office revenue. One explanation is that such releases create greater awareness of the film. This is also the period of heaviest advertising. In conjunction with the main estimates, this suggests that free and potentially degraded goods such as the lower quality movies available on file sharing networks can have some beneficial effects on intellectual property."

Comments

"Lower quality"?

[kruach aum]

Pretty sure bluray and dvd rips have a significantly higher quality than what is commercially available, as they have all the unskippable bullshit stripped out.

P2P helps movie buffs outside the US

[invictusvoyd]

There are a lot of movie buffs in countries where good foreign and hollywood movies are not released. Video libraries are poorly equipped for the niche films and are usually expensive. P2P provides these people with movies they'd wanna watch . I dont think that'd hurt the industry much .. maybe they'll get a few foreign fans .

we've known this for a while

[drizuid]

Every movie i've ever purchased from a hadj in afghanistan or some little old lady in the back of a restaurant in New York has done one of two things.
1)It's either completely turned me off of the movie because it was horrible. This doesn't cost a thing because now the money never changed hands; in the case of ultraviolet, i had to go get my money back for the movie being so terrible.
2)Has been awesome enough that i either simply want to see it on the theater screen with their lovely DTS surround or I want to watch it in 3D on a huge screen.

I'm a huge supporter of try before you buy. I had frozen MONTHS before it released on dvd and still ended up taking my daughters to the movies multiple times to see it.

Re:I'm not an anti sharing nazi...

[Sockatume]

Who's reproducing things poorly? Pirated content these days is either ripped from Blu-Rays sent to critics (who can't make it to a theatre) or the actual theatre-quality data files used in digital projection. It's not only in equal fidelity to the original, it's often in a more convenient format.

I can't speak for movies but I used to download shows where I'd missed episodes, as an alternative to finding a VCR (who even has those?) or waiting six months for a DVD boxed set. It certainly helped me maintain my engagement in the series. I stopped because PVRs became affortable (I got one for free from my broadband provider) and VoD catch up services suddenly became ubiquitous.