Donkey Vs Kong

Wrestling Update: File-sharing vs the movie moguls, the saga continues. Failing to see online demand as an opportunity rather than threat, the studio heads continue their futile attempts to bring file-sharing to it’s knees.

Hollywood
“Precious, precious, precious!… My Precious! O my Precious!,”
– 3D character in a recent trilogy which emptied pockets of US$4billion worldwide.

Blockbuster films have come to symbolise the modern movie making machine, and one of the biggest blockbusters of future months will undoubtedly be ‘King Kong’ being directed by Peter Jackson. Alongside a suit filed in February against New Line Cinema for underpaying him US$100 million for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson is also taking unprecedented cautions at every stage of production to protect the King Kong remake from being copied and leaked on the internet.

“I don’t believe piracy can be easily beaten; fighting fire with fire by releasing movies on DVD at the same time as cinemas is probably where the industry is heading in the next few years,” said Mr. Jackson, in the New York Times recently, “Electronic delivery directly into both cinemas and people’s homes will not necessarily beat pirates, but it will mean studios are at least on a similar playing field.”

With DVD’s now making up two thirds of Hollywood’s profits, internet downloads are only one part of the piracy problem, and the significant chains of black market bootleggers are another. Increased home gaming options and the internet as entertainment also surely diminish Hollywood profits – but in part because Hollywood has placed effort on trying to punish file-sharers rather than trying to net-deliver movies to the home directly themselves.

To Peter Jackson’s credit, www.kongisking.net embraces online users very well – offering live chat with production crew, a trailer while the film is still in post-production and a weekly video diary which shows how everything is unfolding behind the scenes. Harnessing the net like this, rather than attempting to demonise a ready audience, seems a much more fruitful route for the film industry, and perhaps one day they will develop the foresight to offer cheap legitimate downloads too – circumventing in one swoop any need to seek out pirate copies in the first place.

From Bollywood To Nollywood
India’s vibrant film industry is well known already, given all of the fine dramas and cheesy musical romances spilling out of Bombay on a near daily basis. Kollywood – referring to the Tamil Cinema of Southern India ( Kodambakkam in the state of Tamil) and Tollywood – referring to both the Telugu and Bengali language film industries, are both lesser knowns, and now they compete with Nollywood – Nigeria’s booming film industry, gathering the steam of some 400-800 films being made per year. Most of these seem to be shot in a few weeks and go straight to VHS for Nigeria’s lucrative VHS market ( apparently there 57 million plus households in Nigeria with video players). Presumably without having blockbuster budgets to pay back though, they probably miss out on the joys of tie-in merchandising ( googling nollywood barbie / lunchbox / underwear turned up zero ).

Oh and for hard-core Nollywood documentary – try ‘Delta Force’ – a glimpse at the brutal world of Shell‘s 30 years of oil extraction from Nigeria, with scant consideration to the environmental devastation ( in ways they would never do in a western country ) and even the supplying of weapons to the Nigerian military dictatorship of the time. Nasty.

The Bee Bee Cee
One broadcaster that does recognise the opportunity in online demand for content delivered over the wires, is of course that great maker of documentary and dark twisted comedies ( something about the weather there?), the BBC. With great foresight they have already begun to explore providing archives of their vast material online – and with ‘creative commons’ licences which allow people to remix the material for non-profit use. Radio shows have been released as podcasts online and the news that new Doctor Who episodes leaked online before airing only served to excite them about the potential audiences that await their planned expansion for broadcasting programs and entire channels on online, and on mobile phones – as a series of pilots to access public demand.

eDonkey Vs Bit Torrent
“We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious.”

File-sharing of course continues apace, despite the ongoing threat of film and music industry crackdown and in part because of the time those industries are taking to better offer content delivered online. Much noise has been made about ‘Bit Torrent’ software and it’s peer to peer capacity for sharing bandwidth when downloading large files. Needless to say bit torrent sites have been targetted ( rather than the industry utilising the technology to distribute their own content ), and while some say there has been a slight drop in Bit Torrent use, that has more than been made up for in the decentralised eDonkey network.
Briefly glimpsing http://mldonkey.berlios.de/, www.edonkey200.com/downloads.php and www.nongnu.org/mldonkey/ should surely be enough to remind media industry folk that file sharing will continue as long as bandwidth is available to share files with, regardless of what the technology might be.

Autobot Roulette:

• No Related Posts