Whilst at my sister's this weekend, we all watched The Incredibles on pirate DVD. The DVD was bought by my sister from a friend of a friend, for £5. Two stories in my aggregator today happily coincide with something I've been thinking about for a while: the cinematic experience, and how the entertainment industry is its own worst enemy.
Firstly, film-makers demand action over £1bn DVD black market. Apparently "the value of the DVD black market, now worth up to £500 million, is expected to exceed £1 billion by 2007." In the second story, we hear that 'BitTorrent' gives Hollywood a headache, because "BitTorrent has proven to be resistant to some of the countermeasures the entertainment industry has taken to sabotage file-sharing".
So here's my take on the situation: the industry should fix the cause of the problem, and not try to sue and otherwise attack their customers.
There are many reasons why people legitimately want to watch films like The Incredibles before the official DVD is released.
The modern-day cinema experience sucks. For a 2 hour film like The Incredibles, in a mainstream cinema you are subjected to 15 minutes of adverts and 15 minutes of trailers. Most kids get extremely impatient waiting 30 minutes for the film to start. When I took my oldest nephew, I was unable to take my younger nephew too because of this long delay. Then, factor in the cost - for one adult and one child, the cost of the cinema visit is £10.50, not including drinks and popcorn. It's expensive. If the average British family of 2 adults and 2.4 children wanted to go, they'd be looking at the equivalent cost of a night in with DVDs and pizzas. It's not difficult to see which would be preferable.
Release schedules are daft. Van Helsing is only just coming out on DVD, but was out at the cinemas months ago. If you really want to see the latest releases but are unable to go to the cinema, you have to wait too long. I rarely go to the cinema these days, primarily due to lack of significant other, lack of time, and lack of money. Many others are unable to go for a wide variety of reasons - too young to sit through a film at the cinema, ill health, lack of transport to the cinema, etc. Should they wait for the DVD release, despite everyone else talking about the films, and the plot being thoroughly given away in advance? Not to mention the fact that kids are obsessive little buggers, and having seen something at the cinema, want to watch it over and over again.
Add in things like region encoding (no, you can't buy films on holiday, sorry), and pricing (the average price for a DVD seems to be between £12-£14). Suddenly £5 for a cheap black market copy that you can play anywhere seems reasonable.
I don't believe it's right to make a profit from selling illegal copies of DVDs (or anything else). But I can understand that there is a market, online and offline, for accessing films before the studios want us to. Maybe the studios should accept that they cannot kill the demand, and that they therefore need to offer what the customers want. A bit of hype and anticipation is fine, locking things down and overcharging is not. The consumers are routing around the barriers.