The Movie Industry should embrace BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on March 06, 2006With the uprise of digital cinema, movie companies are looking into different ways to distribute digital movies. One of the best alternatives is obviously BitTorrent. Using BitTorrent to distribute digital movies will reduce distribution costs to nearly 0$.
This means that the movie industry could save up to 2000$ per copy. So sending out 1000 digital copies will save 2.000.000$ (cheaper tickets please).
This cost saving can be essential, especially for low-budget movies. Take a movie with a 2 million$ budget for example. Distributing the actual prints for wide release will be 100% or more of the total budget. This will never happen; the movie will go straight to TV or DVD instead. But by distributing the film though BitTorrent this will be no problem at all.
And it’s not only the distribution that’s cheaper (wiki):
Digital cinema has some big economic advantages over film, being very cheap compared to film. For instance Rick McCallum, a producer on Attack of the Clones, said that it cost US$16,000 for 220 hours of digital tape where a comparable amount of film would have cost US$1.8 million. Obviously this matters most to low-budget films which are often shot for a few million dollars or less.
Wait a second; am I going to watch a cheap xvid rip in a movie theatre?
No, not exactly. A proper digital movie will be around 120 GB per hour (33 MB/s). In order to send it the movie must be compressed and encrypted (see DCDM format). We need it to be save, we don’t want any 200GB movies showing up at mininova or the piratebay.
Proper specs.
But there is more. BitTorrent will not only be cost saving, it will be also a lot faster. Of course the movie theatres should get a decent line, but with a 100Mbps connection a 200GB movie would take less than 8 hours to distribute. Without BitTorrent online distribution would be nearly impossible, imagine 1000 theatres downloading a 200GB movie from 1 host.
So please stop complaining about piracy and decreasing sales and do something, welcome to the wonderfull world of BitTorrent.
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8 Responses
A film budget does not include the distribution costs mainly because they get a distribution company to do it for them. Such as Universal or Paramount.
Digital copies of the movie are around 300gb, and they do transfer them, but there is no need for them to use bittorrent, as the connections they have inplace are fast enough to copy a few MB per second.
I’m not saying that the distribution costs are included in the budget. I just want to point out that those costs are relatively high for low budget movies.
Second point, A connection of a few MB per second is useless if you want to ship to more than 1000 theatres.
And then morons like Jon Stewart during the Acadamy awards spew out bullshit like we’re stealing from ‘them’ – sorry that you didn’t get to buy your new ferari this month…assholes.
We don’t take anything from anyone. We never intended to watch the movie, we just thought it would be good data to download.
spot on! I totally agree!
WHO WOULD DOWNLOAD A 200GB MOVIE!!
Youd be surprised. i rekon people would download a 200gig movie considering it would be stupidly high quality when other versions at cinema release would be cam versions and very poor. and people have nothing better to do i guess.
They do not do digital downloads to all the theaters. Mainly becuase if someone got ahold of the address where to download it from it would go astray.
They currently just give the distrubution company a digital copy, and they print it onto film. Much easier, safer for everyone. You should take that being a pirate is what they try to prevent ;)
i want torrent to be faster it is very slow withe me
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