Economic downturn has left many figuring out a way to cut out the middleman, to reach the audience without having to “spend so much money on advertising and promotion.”
With Hollywood box office ticket sales on pace to shatter last year’s all-time record by a mind numbing 9%, it seems appropriate to mention why again P2P isn’t the monster the MPAA claims it is.
For Indie filmmakers P2P has been a godsend in the current economic downturn, allowing them to bypass mainstream studios and directly connect with fans.
“Releasing it for free is just good marketing,”Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola told Time. “Whether it’s through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this.”
So far his movie Star Wreck has been downloaded some 9 million times.
The problem recently has been that many Indie movie distributors, stung by the poor economy, have either quit the business or cut their budgets dramatically, leaving many scrambling for an alternative.
Earlier this year self-taught animator Nina Paley used an interesting combination of P2P and physical merchandise sales to turn a profit on her film Sita Sings the Blues.
Concerned more with art for arts sake her first and only concern was putting the movie in the hands of the audience so they could enjoy her creation as much as she has.
She writes:
The whole struggle with our broken copyright system turned me into a Free Culture activist. I’m actually going to release all my old Nina’s Adventures and Fluff comics under a Share Alike (copyleft) license too. I saw what happened to Annette Hanshaw’s beautiful recordings: they got locked up so no one could hear them. I didn’t want that to happen to my film. My first concern is Art, and Art has no life if people can’t share it.
To recoup her costs Paley sells movie-related merchandise like t-shirts, pins, and movie prints. So far she’s been able to to make a net profit of $55,000 on the venture.
“What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film, the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise,” she says. “With a normal theatrical release you have to spend so much money on advertising and promotion that most independent films lose money.”
Last November the Indie film Ink was leaked to BitTorrent and the movie’s writer and director expressed their happiness with the turn of events
Though obviously not “excited that people are seeing the film without paying” they definitely enjoyed the “enormous amount of exposure” that availability on BitTorrent gave them.
“Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure,” they said. It’s a little different being that they weren’t responsible for making the movie available on P2P, but the movie was surely seen by many more people than it would have otherwise, and could give them opportunities in the future that were not available to them before.
The real benefit of P2P is that it allows budding movie directors to reach fans like never before, so amidst all the talk of a P2P crackdown the govt needs to be reminded that it does have legitimate uses as well.
Stay tuned.
