10 Things That Signal The Death Of Movies‏

8. The Rise Of Movie Piracy

Another part of the allure for things like IMAX and 3D to studios is that films shot in these unwieldy formats are supposedly impossible to bootleg. As bandwidth speeds got faster and torrent sites more sophisticated movie piracy has moved from the shadowy market stall full of DVD-Rs to free high speed downloads, from shaky handy-cam footage taken at the back of a cinema to HD quality leaks from within the very institutions producing the films. The most recent estimate is that movie piracy has cost the movie industry upwards of $2.5 billion a year. That's actually a lot less than the studios' original estimate of $58 billion, but it's still substantial enough for the suits to be sweating about their annual bonuses. It's a worldwide problem, too, as the closure of Blockbuster stores in Spain was put down to the country's rampant movie piracy, and the home video market in South Korea has fallen by a staggering 95% since 2000. Coincidentally in that time their download speeds have increased exponentially. Funny that. If piracy carries on at this rate, there not only won't be any money left to make films in Hollywood, but nobody to make them. They'll have all since been let go to do something more lucrative, like joining Google's future cyborg army. With all forms of internet piracy, however, there's the feeling that the genie's out of the bottle, and there's no way of getting it back in. Certainly not by prosecuting your potential audience, as record labels and movie studios have been doing. Piracy has become so rampant that Netflix actually look at the statistics for what gets downloaded most when deciding what to add to their catalogue. So it's good for something, we suppose.