India, one of the world’s biggest film markets, also has one of the bigger piracy rates in the world and the Hollywood and Bollywood studios want to try to put an end to it.
The MPAA and seven Indian companies have signed a coalition intended to fight piracy, with the group working with movie theaters to try to shutdown camcorder recordings, as well as working with ISPs to shut down the ease of Internet piracy.
The industry group would not reveal the budget but did say it would come from its members, the major studios. The MPAA has anti-piracy coalitions in the U.S., the EU and Hong Kong.
“People are becoming more of the same mind,” adds Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. “The Indian film industry now understands their product is getting stolen at significant rates.”
According to an Ernst & Young study, piracy cost the Indian economy $959 million and 571,000 jobs in 2008.
Result for: motion picture
In June, the three major motion picture studios, Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM jointly announced the launch of Epix, an HD online streaming service and HD TV station that will allow users to watch the studio’s films, for free, in HD.
The studios have said this week that the expected launch date of late October is still in the cards, and launch day will see blockbuster films on the service, including “Iron Man.”
Epix is, technically, a studio-controlled venture that will give cable operators and distributors an easier way to shop for rights for movies on video-on-demand and online video. It may all sound good, but the studios have been having a little trouble securing carriage deals. Comcast even went as far as to say that they are not looking for any new TV-with-fee channels.
Epix only currently has a deal with Verizon FiOS, meaning the site will be available to a minuscule 2.5 million US citizens. The company is in talks with Dish, which would add 14 million households, but currently the talks are just that, talks.
Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman is completely faithful in the business model however, and says it will be “cash positive at the end of next year or early the following year.”
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer agrees: “We have the right idea and the right value proposition. We’re investing in a channel that should have big equity value.”
Result for: motion picture
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed another request for the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to give a waiver on the 2003 “plug and play” order which prohibits altering a video stream to disable the analog or digital signal to consumers home theater equipment. The MPAA first made the request in June 2008, but consumer groups such as Public Knowledge opposed the waiver and former FCC Chair Kevin Martin didn’t like the idea either.
The MPAA claims that the waiver, which will allow the use of “selectable output control” (SOC) measures, will enable studios to link up with broadcasters to air pre-DVD releases that will benefit consumers. “Physically challenged or elderly consumers who have limited mobility would have greater choice in movie viewing options,” a filing from the trade group reads.
Pro-consumer groups are not convinced however, largely because the use of SOC will inevitable disable some HDTV’s in the United States when they try to view such broadcasts. Public Knowledge warned that SOC would, “break all eleven million HDTVs in the US that don’t have digital input” and allow the MPAA to control when and how you view content with equipment you have already paid for.
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) went even further and said that as many as 20 million HDTV sets could cease to function as they did when they were bought. Public Knowledge then came back to add that CEA figures are actually a low estimate, because you also have to account for digital video recorders (DVR) and other consumer electronics hardware that can only receive from analog connections.
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