Hollywood Studios Fuming Over Indie Studio Deal With BitTorrent 187
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.'"
Re:BitTorrent is not what they fear (Score:5, Informative)
But its cute to try and blame it on one particular ... protocol? I'm not sure what 'deal with bittorrent' means. I mean, I get the 'first 7 minutes to bittorrent users' but who is that exactly? People that use software from bittorrent inc? Anyone with a bittorrent client? Who are they actually talking about? Well thought out statement you have there.
If you visit http://www.bittorrent.com/ [bittorrent.com] it will become quickly apparent what they mean, I think.
http://bundles.bittorrent.com/torrents/BitTorrent-ArthurNewman.torrent [bittorrent.com]
I imagine they're seeding it.
The end of block by assumption (Score:4, Informative)
I ditched warner bro's cable because they assumed all my UDP traffic was P2P. The went from shaping UDP to flat out blocking it. I wouldn't doubt they have hope other ISPs would follow. Anything legitimizing P2P would mean they couldn't block UDP based on assumption. Well. Considering how clue free their networking engineers seem to be, that might not be true.
Re:The end of block by assumption (Score:2, Informative)
Did they really block all your UDP traffic?!
Somehow I find that very unlikely.
UDP is used in a wide variety of common internet protocols, including DNS, so I highly doubt that they blocked all UDP traffic.
If they did, you should complain to the FCC, and let the FCC give them a nasty fine and force them to change their practices, because that sounds very illegal.
I am pretty sure ISP's are not allowed to block ports or protocols.
HasHie @ TrYPNET.net
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
The economic reality is that motion pictures are a star-delivery system -- people pay to see faces and people they are familiar with, more than story and any other "quality" metric. A $10 million salary is justified if the movie will make $100 million, when the reality is that if it didn't have the star in the first place, it would have only barely made its cost back. Most of being an "star" actor isn't in the acting, it's the intentional ruining of your life in order to maintain a brand or image that audiences will seek out again and again.
This is why lead actors don't generally get "$10 million," but in fact get $5 million or $10 million "against" some percentage of the producer's gross take of the box office. Their celebrity is the primary equity contribution they make to the film. Sad, and not a very nice thing to say about the intelligence of the median moviegoer, but it's the truth, particularly when the move is sold to foreign markets, where movies make the majority of their money nowadays.
The alternative would be to pay the actors flat and let the producers keep the $100 million -- this is how it generally worked before the Free Agency revolution in Hollywood the 1950s, and the system was universally derided as exploitive and biased in favor of the studios over working artists.
Re:Indie - pendent (Score:5, Informative)
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:Matter of time (Score:5, Informative)
How long before a talented bunch of individuals are capable of making high quality movies without the industries backing.
What? You haven't seen Star Wreck? [starwreck.com] Hilarious and better than half the dreck from hollywood. And it's a free download! DUDE!!!!
Re:and WHO are the movie studios in it for, us? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:and WHO are the movie studios in it for, us? (Score:4, Informative)
Most, yes. Like musicians, a handful become stars and get rich, the rest make a marginal living at best, usually with some other job.