Star Wreck, a movie directed by Timo Vuorensola backed up by a crew of independent film makers became a great success thanks to BitTorrent. The Star Trek parody, released under a Creative Commons lisence has been downloaded millions of times. The movie became Finland’s most popular movie within just a couple of months, and is translated into various languages (subtitles).
The movie had two sold-out screenings at a Norwegian film festival and in Januari the movie was broadcasted on a Finnish TV channel.
According to Timo they sold over 5,000 DVD’s, bringing in more than 120,000$ while the cost to make the movie were less than 16,000$ .
Timo said he owes the success to BitTorrent.
“Some people – the older generation of filmmakers not so familiar with the internet – might have seen Star Wreck as some sort of bubble, which will explode. This is not a bubble. I believe it is a new form of film-making and film distribution.”
More and more people are looking closely at this, and related success stories. Star Wreck was even mentioned in a paper by Microsoft’s research department.
it is important for commercial P2P distribution systems to publicize and encourage their legal uses and applications. In this regard, applications such as those recently enabled by the BBC for distributing TV shows, the World of Warcraft ingame patching system, or the distribution of the independent film Star Wreck, can help improve perception over P2P networks.
And recently Mark Achbar, the producer of the award winning movie “The Corporation” told TorrentFreak that he was looking into ways to distribute his movie over BitTorrent. His latest idea is to put out a “THE CORPORATION — Filmmaker-authorized Shareware Version”. This means people can download it and make a donation (or buy a dvd) if they like it. He is recognizing the possibilities P2P has:
I agree that the vast majority of those who downloaded The Corporation, if they didn’t also see it in a theatre, or buy the DVD, would have been—and may still be willing to—pay a bit toward the production costs, but there was just no mechanism for them to do it.
Never underestimate the power of BitTorrent….
