Study: No Connection Between Torrenting And US Box Office Numbers
Hollywood is one of those Gung Ho institutions pushing for the nefarious multi-headed bills to be pushed through Capitol Hill regulating the Internet. Shackling it down. That sort of jazz. They cite piracy as a major concern and cause of financial loss, which goes against at least one study.
I Heart Chaos:
With all the money that Hollywood’s been throwing at trying to stop movie pirating, you’d think sites like The Pirate Bay were absolutely destroying the movie business model, but that’s not the case. According to a study from Wellesley College and the University of Missouri, bit torrents have no effect on US box office revenue. Even better, the study finds pirating goes way down when movies are released onto the international market sooner.
An international movie release following its U.S. debut is wrought with technical difficulties that contribute to a wide release window. The expensive cost of the 35mm film print (a 110 year old technology) for distribution to movie theaters, both domestic and international, typically consumes 3.5 percent of a film’s budget. In an effort to cut costs, it’s common practice for distributors to reuse film from theater to theater, thereby exacerbating the time between releases. But recently, theaters have been slowly transitioning from film to digital projection systems.
The study underlines three other key problems for movie studios:
1. There is a shortage of international theaters.
2. The complexity of organizing promotional appearances for the film’s actors adds to the delay.
3. Action and science fiction genres exhibit the highest supply of online pirated movies.
What shouldn’t come as a surprise from the aforementioned complications is that the restlessness of international fans, waiting weeks or months for a film’s release, is often assuaged by watching pirated material. But what needs to be highlighted from the study is its evidence supporting the notion that, generally, consumers, both domestic and international, will favor theaters over illegal distribution channels.
“Consumers in the US who would choose between the box office and piracy choose the box office (and the remaining US pirates had valuations lower than the ticket price) but that international consumers who would consider both options choose piracy due to a lack of legal availability,” wrote the researchers. “If piracy displaced box office sales in the US, we would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more significantly as BitTorrent became more widely adopted.”
In other words, researchers were unable to discern an irregular drop in returns of domestic box office sales, which could fault BitTorrent as the culprit.
It’s obviously only one study, but I still find it interesting. Thoughts?