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Piracy Movies Entertainment

DVD Release Delays Boost Piracy and Hurt Sales, Study Shows (torrentfreak.com) 202

One of the reasons that drive people to piracy is the delay in the release of a title's DVD or Blu-Ray in their local market. According to a new academic paper from Carnegie Mellon University, movie fans are finding it increasingly difficult to wait for the official DVD or Blu-Ray to come out. From a TorrentFreak report: Due to artificial delays which vary across different parts of the world, pirates can often get their hands on a high-quality rip of a movie before the DVD is officially released in their country. Researchers have looked into this piracy "window of opportunity," and found that release delays are actually hurting DVD and Blu-Ray sales. "Our results suggest that an additional 10-day delay between the availability of digital piracy and the legitimate DVD release date in a particular country is correlated with a 2-3% reduction in DVD sales in that country," the researchers write.
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DVD Release Delays Boost Piracy and Hurt Sales, Study Shows

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  • Really? (Score:4, Funny)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:08AM (#52241643) Homepage Journal

    No shit, Sherlock.
    Next, are they going to tell us water is wet?

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:16AM (#52241723) Homepage
      It's good to have a formal study done that can be cited, rather than just a theory or anecdotes.
      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Up next: Region blocking people from viewing content online causes piracy too! Though water isn't wet, it may be a fine powdery liquid in light of future surveys.

    • I wonder how they get a rip before the DVD comes out? I'm going to guess that the theaters now get digital copies and those get rippped. I wonder why they can't control that effectively. E.g. watermark every theater's version differently.

      • by lordbeejee ( 732882 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:39AM (#52241947)

        I wonder how they get a rip before the DVD comes out? I'm going to guess that the theaters now get digital copies and those get rippped. I wonder why they can't control that effectively. E.g. watermark every theater's version differently.

        The DVD from another region is used for the rip. It's a study about the delays between regions, not between theater and home release.

        • Aww, cry me a river, the territory protection doesn't work anymore. Boo-hoo. Cry me a river.

          Especially since that cries to have their territory protection back coming from companies that demand customs-free imports for their DVDs that they manufacture cheaply abroad.

          Customs free for THEM, of course. Not for you. For you, it better be illegal to buy a cheap (non-forged, original) DVD for 1 buck in a South East Asian shop and import it.

        • Or why do they even sell DVDs at all? Why aren't these media companies providing timely streaming or download options? I haven't watched a DVD in 5 years.
          • Or why do they even sell DVDs at all? Why aren't these media companies providing timely streaming or download options?

            They are. Availability for purchase on iTunes Store on the same day as DVD release has been around for years. See Apple's eight-year-old press release [apple.com]. DVDs are still made available in the first place because parts of the United States still have satellite or cellular at $5 to $10 per GB as the cheapest home Internet option.

            • by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @12:34PM (#52243749) Journal
              I hardly consider ITunes an option. You have to have itunes on a computer and then remove the DRM to play on your tv... there might be something I am missing but this is not really consumer friendly.
              • by tepples ( 727027 )

                I hardly consider ITunes an option. You have to have itunes on a computer and then remove the DRM to play on your tv

                Or have iTunes on the computer and connect the PC's DVI-D or HDMI out to the TV's HDMI in. Or have iTunes on the computer and connect the PC's VGA out to the TV's VGA in. Or buy an Apple TV [wikipedia.org] device. How is the last of these "not really consumer friendly"?

                • These are terrible options. Who wants a computer in their living room? And what if you don't want to use Apple products? I have several devices already connected to my TV that are perfectly capable of streaming and none of them work with Itunes.
                  • Who wants a computer in their living room?

                    If only tiny computers like a Mac Mini existed! Man, I can't wait until that becomes a possibility.

                  • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

                    Me. I have an old laptop (Core2Duo) next to the TV which runs netflix, youtube, plays DVDs, etc. It's smaller than the Blu-ray player next to it, but the next cast-off laptop will have a Blu-ray drive, and the player goes to ebay.

                    You don't need Apple products - more and more disc releases include an Ultraviolet download redemption code in the box - unfortunately playback needs MS Silverlight, but that's the cost of avoiding Apple products, if that's your thing.

            • iTunes or Amazon why buy it? The drm scheme means in 10-15 years it is useless.

              It should be up for rent for a a year or so.

              There is some value in buying if you watch the same thing over and over again( like kids movies). How ever I can't watch the same movie to often as I memorize it and get bored. So while I did see the force awakens three times that was do to being a good friend and brother as much as wanting to watch it twice.

        • by E-Rock ( 84950 )

          Sometimes it's from the factory making them for the US. So the torrent sites have the real products well in advance of anyone being able to buy it.

      • You get the "rip" from friends living in countries where the show was aired or is already available on DVD.

        E.g. no one - except die hard fans - is buying a DVD of Game of Thrones in Europe. It simply takes to long to wait. So people rip it in the states. I know guys who fly to New York or Washington just to make a vacation to either buy there or to record it from a video on demand service.

        I a new sequel of e.g. GoT is starting, people all over the world want to see it NOW, not in three months or six months.

        • It makes exactly zero sense to buy a GoT DVD in Europe. By the time you could possibly buy it, it is virtually impossible NOT to know yet which of the people you knew croaked by the end of the season due to discussions on the internet.

          And the same applies to ANY content. I don't even follow GoT but I would be VERY surprised if that wasn't the case. Either release it everywhere at the same time or deal with the consequences. Even if I can't copy the content, why bother buying a movie where the plot matters (

          • Because you want to watch/read/listen to the media multiple times and want to support the creators of the content. I regularly download books, music, and a few shows. Those that I really like and know that I will want to repeatedly enjoy I'll buy to make sure that the people can make a living (most important for the music since I listen to a lot of independent artists) and that they hopefully can create more great media in the future.

          • why bother buying a movie where the plot matters (i.e. not directed by Michael Bay) when I know beforehand how it's going to end?

            I thought spoilers increased enjoyment [npr.org] as well as aerodynamics.

      • The rips come from other countries where the DVD has already been released. Electronic copies get round the world faster than the physical disks, particularly when the release dates are staggered around the world for whatever reason some media exec came up with.

      • DVD's go out to those who vote for the Oscar's well ahead of the theatrical release. Those get watermarked with text.

      • Screeners. [wikipedia.org]

      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        Digital Cinema films are nearly always encrypted. You can load it onto the server, but it won't play without the decryption key, and that's only good for a limited period. You'd also have to re-render and re-compress the content anyway - DCP format is one file containing JPEG2000 frames, and one or more files containing the audio WAV files (plus metadata in XML files). I've seen DCP films over 180GB, so you'd need to grab the video frames, re-encode and compress them back to an MPEG stream, then re-mux the

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Funny enough, this was proven about 10 years ago, too. Back during the High-Def format wars, there was a format called HD-DVD, which in the end featured NO region coding. None at all.

      It completely screwed up the movie industry because when the HD-DVDs came out, people around the world started importing them because they would often be released in North America BEFORE it even hit theatres in other countries!

      And being region free meant you just bought an HD-DVD player locally and bought your discs from Amazon

      • I fail to see the point in the staggered releases and/or excluded regions. The folks behind the HD-DVD spec apparently didn't either.
  • It's sometimes bewildering to watch companies with a responsibility to shareholders behave in ways that appear counterproductive to their own bottom line. If the study from Carnegie Mellon passes peer review *and* the movie industry does not respond in a way that actually curbs piracy, then one has to wonder what exactly drives their behavior. This is not a rhetorical question. If anybody here on /. has insight into this, please share.
    • by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:50AM (#52242085) Homepage

      I can sum up what drives their behavior in one word: Inertia.

      Of course, studio owners want to get as much money as possible. However, inertia limits them as they see "the way we've always done things" as the only way to do things. New ways of doing things are scary to them because they might fail while the tried and true methods are guaranteed* to produce results.

      * Of course, they're not actually guaranteed to produce results, but in the studio owner's minds they are more rock solid than crazy ideas like same day, worldwide distribution or widely available digital distribution no matter how many studies come out proving the studio owners wrong.

    • by swb ( 14022 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @10:08AM (#52242297)

      My economics question is why back catalog movies which have been released on disc can't be purchased as downloads. I mean, the movie has already been telecined to a data format and often the DVD press runs for back catalog titles are small and the movie can sometimes become unobtainable at all except as a bootleg.

      Which raises the question as to why studios make it so expensive for Netflix or the like streaming companies to gain access to back catalog titles. I'm guessing these titles aren't exactly burning up the sales charts and that a budget licensing deal for streaming on back catalog title to a streaming provider would be revenue they mostly wouldn't expect to get from a DVD. There's a ton of back catalog titles I'd watch on via streaming if they showed up on Netflix but only about once a year do I get the bug to buy a disc, and even then it's often a case where you can't even buy it because the tiny press run is sold out.

      • My economics question is why back catalog movies which have been released on disc can't be purchased as downloads.

        A lot of film producers' hands are tied by contracts with upstream licensors (such as the author and publisher of a novel adapted into a film or the performer, record label, songwriter, and music publisher of music used in the film) or with cast and crew unions whose members work on a residual basis rather than a "work made for hire" basis. Not all such contracts that provide for a home video release also provide for selling downloads. DVD early on had a similar problem with older films whose home video con

        • Disney and McDonalds also both take advantage of the McRib sales strategy. People in general are foolish and if something is only available for a limited time, even if it's awful, we're more likely to give in and buy it.

      • If I was forced to come up with an explanation, I expect it would be that if old titles were made available that there is fear that it would hurt new title sales.
      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        You need to trace the distribution rights - which studio sold their entire back catalogue to Turner? I can't remember exactly when that happened, but it was long before the DVD era, and that's why there was a "Turner Classic Movies" channel on cable/satellite. I had Foxtel for a little while, and there were more "oldies" on TCM than I ever saw for sale on VHS.

        If the studios weren't able to anticipate the sheer amount of money they could make by having their back catalogues available on disc or via streaming

    • by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      The thing is, this study only proves a correlation between delays and piracy. But what movie companies do is they increase the delay in countries known to have a high rate of piracy to keep the movies from hitting the torrent sites. They believe that the sales lost in those countries are smaller than the sales not lost due to piracy in the countries the movie is released. Whether that assumption is true is an interesting question, and unfortunately this study doesn't even try to answer it. The correlation i

    • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

      This is why libertarianism fails: there is no such thing as a spherical market of uniform density. The players in the market are not acting in rational self-interest, but in a variety of irrational ways, and therefore expecting the Market to sort things out rationally is doomed to failure.

    • Megalomania and denial.

  • No shit Sherlock! (Score:5, Informative)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:21AM (#52241773)

    The "artificial delays" are simply a specific form of artificial scarcity, and we humans always do our damnedest to route around them.

    We also *really* don't want to be lectured to about piracy when we're watching a legally purchased DVD, nor do we want to watch ads, (except for movie trailers), in a DVD we've already fscking paid for. But media producers and distributors seem positively addicted to the practice of strapping on a pair of cleats and stepping on their own dicks.

    • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:44AM (#52242023)

      We also *really* don't want to be lectured to about piracy when we're watching a legally purchased DVD

      Don't forget that abomination that is region coding. Why the fuck can't I watch a DVD at home that I bought while on vacation in another country?

      (and yes I do know about the *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink* region unlocking of the DVD player manufacturers)

    • by ameline ( 771895 )

      Actually I don't want to see any ads (trailers or otherwise) in anything I've paid for. My time is valuable to me -- it is a very limited commodity that is very difficult to get more of.

      This is one of the ways that the pirated product is superior to the legal one.

      • Your time is so precious that you can't stand the few seconds it takes to skip (or not) the stuff at the beginning of the disc... yet you are watching a movie... which is really just a waste of time.

        • by vux984 ( 928602 )

          You assume it's easily skippable.

          And it gets pretty obnoxious when you throw in a DVD from 1999 and it tries to waste your time with trailers for something that bombed in theatres and was completely forgotten by 2001.

        • The DVD-Video standard requires players to implement UOP [wikipedia.org], which allows discs to specify that a certain control shall cause the player to display the letter Ø in the corner of the screen for five seconds instead of performing the requested action. It was intended to make copyright notices unskippable, but distributors have abused it to make advertisements unskippable.

          Press "Top Menu": Ø. Press "Title Menu": Ø. Press "next chapter": Ø (arrrgh). What's left?

          • Also - what is so hard about making trailers a bonus feature on discs? Display a 5-second unskippable blurb inviting purchasers of the legally-distributed content "Hey we included movie trailers as free bonus features" - this removes the annoyance factor, it turns the ads into something marketable, and makes the product less user-hostile, and yet, the ads still get delivered. Everybody wins!

            One thing they need to nix is that bogus FBI warning, because:

            * Most usenet, torrent, etc. releases prior to t

  • DVD? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:22AM (#52241781) Homepage Journal
    What the heck is a "DVD"? Is that Russian or something?
    • Re:DVD? (Score:5, Funny)

      by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:47AM (#52242057)

      Laugh while you can monkey boy but everyone knows that DVDs have warmer video than cold looking digital streams or blu-ray!

      Like LPs they'll be making a comeback soon enough!

      Retro-tech for teh win!

      • Basically if you aren't viewing the original print from a chronophotographic gun you are missing the artistry of the film entirely. You might as well close your eyes!
        • bullshit, everybody knows that the only way to truly appreciate the visual arts is by a gold plated optic fiber transmitting photons entagled with the original sunlight that hit the actors and scenes during the original filming. Don't even get me started on the delayed transmission of sound waves.
    • It's a hipster coaster, all shiny and stuff, to put your drink on while you watch a movie.

    • What the heck is a "DVD"?

      underwear I think

    • It's a physical means of transferring media that you buy which forces you to watch a warning about not pirating content and a bunch of previews every time you put the disc into the player before being able to play the movie. Whereas if you had pirated the movie you could just click on the file and be watching it immediately.

  • I'm pretty sure the curve between maximizing movie-in-theatre revenue and then DVD-before-everyone-forgets-about-it revenue is already well-understood by the entertainment industry.

    But, I still don't understand NEW MOVIE piracy in developed countries. Sure, I pirate every new GoT episode within hours of the official air date, but it's TV that I watch on a 23-inch monitor where quality doesn't really matter. Same thing with a 10+ year-old movie or cartoons that I watch with my kids. However, when I want t
    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      What value is there in movie theaters these days? Why maximize revenue for that outdated distribution chain? Nostalgia? Release worldwide the same day on DVD, streaming, and theaters, and then shut up and take my money. If the theaters aren't adding enough value to stay in business, clearly we're not losing much.

    • But, I still don't understand NEW MOVIE piracy in developed countries. Sure, I pirate every new GoT episode within hours of the official air date, but it's TV that I watch on a 23-inch monitor where quality doesn't really matter. Same thing with a 10+ year-old movie or cartoons that I watch with my kids. However, when I want to watch something with cutting-edge special effects and sound on my home theater (or any 32"+ TV with separate sound system), dropping the $3 to rent a high-quality edition that is gua

  • by Aqualung812 ( 959532 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:37AM (#52241927)

    I don't understand the delays. Just sell it HIGH right out of the gate.
    Make movies something crazy like $60-$80 on opening weekend. Grab all that extra profit while the hype is high and plenty of families with great home theater and 2.5 kids that they don't want to pay concessions for consider it a win-win.
    Drop it by $10 or so every month or so, until they're $20 at the same time they're available now.
    Why do they hate money so much?

    • There's actually a proposal to do this, or something quite similar.

      http://variety.com/2016/film/n... [variety.com]

      • Yeah, I've heard of this, but it sounds about as appealing as UltraViolet.

      • $150 just to be at the table. $50 for temporary (48 hour) access to a movie. I know I wouldn't ever pay $50 for just me to watch a movie. And I'm probably not going to pay that much to "avoid" the theater with my family either. That pricing model seems flawed.
        • $150 just to be at the table. $50 for temporary (48 hour) access to a movie. I know I wouldn't ever pay $50 for just me to watch a movie. And I'm probably not going to pay that much to "avoid" the theater with my family either. That pricing model seems flawed.

          It's not universally appealing, by any means, but it could make sense for quite a few people. In my case, if my wife and I want to go to the movies, it's around $45-50 for tickets, a couple of sodas, and popcorn. Then, if we take a cab, that's another $20. The biggie is child care. It's another $80-100 for the nanny to stay late, plus $60 or so for a car to get her home. So, that's around $200 to go to the movies. $50 would be a bargain. I certainly recognize that we're not typical, but even if the p

        • by oic0 ( 1864384 )
          Took just me and the wife to an xdhd 3d movie a week ago for $36. Just the tickets, no concessions. Figure in $6 or 7 gas. Id rather watch it on my 4k TV with surround at home where I can have a beer and eat pizza.
    • Soderbergh/Cuban did it.

      http://www.cnet.com/news/soder... [cnet.com]

      There's no word on what the outcome was.

      I do agree that there are so many logistical difficulties to seeing movies in the theaters that a large swath of the potential market is excluded by the Hollywood practices.

      For two adults you're basically talking about $70+ to see movie if they have to get a sitter for the kids.

      On the other hand, family movies are cleaning up on this. Make a movie the adults can see with the kids and the family saves money by ju

    • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @12:27PM (#52243677)

      I don't understand the delays. Just sell it HIGH right out of the gate.

      I can't believe we have to have this particular discussion...again. Hopefully studios have learned the lessons of history, so they won't be doomed to repeat them.

      Studios tried selling movies that high ($80-$100) in the beginning. Few movies were purchased, but many were copied from rentals. This was a predictable result of price gouging.

      When studios lowered the prices to something reasonable ($15-$25), VCR (and later, DVD) movie sales skyrocketed and illegal copying was greatly reduced. Illegal copying then ticked back up after people got fed up with the stupid shit studios put in there to delay showing the movie people paid for (ads, previews for things nobody gave two shits about,etc).

      High prices lead to reduced sales, and a large lag time between theatrical release and home release leads to reduced sales. This was obvious to everyone except, apparently, the studios.

      The optimum sales revenue will likely be generated by releasing the DVD (few people give a shit about Blu-Ray) either simultaneously with the theatrical release, or sometimes shortly afterwards (a few weeks, maybe).

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Because the system judges movies by cinema performance. That's why direct to DVD has so much stigma.It

        just needs one blockbuster to break ranks, but when the studio spent hundreds of millions of dollars making it they won't take the risk. Especially in these days of long running franchises, where a bad movie means at best a reboot and at worst losing revenue from 5 potential sequels.

  • by inerlogic ( 695302 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @10:29AM (#52242497) Homepage
    i can watch and re-watch Deadpool AND learn Korean from the subtitles... win/win

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