Just to weigh in on some of this piracy talk... I’m a filmmaker... sort of. I mean, that’s not how I make my living, because I can’t currently do that in film. I had a movie that won festivals all over the world, got released in multiple languages, was for sale on DVD in every Wal-Mart store in the US.
Netflix and the major studios have been playing chess for years and it sucks to watch an industry you’re at the lowest rung of fight it out using their never ending cash reserves.
This didn’t start with streaming, it started with Netflix’ DVDs by mail. They put physical video rental stores out of business, which was inevitable with streaming, but they kicked things off early.
This raised a generation of kids who never had to beg to rent a movie. They just had to queue it up and it came, free from individual costs.
Netflix streaming made this far worse and we are now seeing that generation come to age. A streaming child never even stepped foot in a Blockbuster and doesn’t even understand the concept of renting. They watched what was on Netflix.
You’d be shocked by how many people tell me they’ll look my movie up on Netflix, simply assuming it is on there. The same way you’ll hear people say “I’ll wait until it’s on Netflix.”
We are tech nerds on a tech forum, but there’s a shocking amount of people that think Netflix gets EVERYthing. When, in reality, Netflix has less than 5,000 movies at any given time and their catalog of non-exclusive content gets much smaller every year.
To the average person, Netflix is the Spotify of movies, but the only difference is that Spotify/Apple Music actually has (and retains) more than 95% of all music, while Netflix has less than 5% of all movies at any given time.
Spotify is a piracy killer. Netflix and all the other half-assed movie streaming services are not. They breed piracy through exclusive content (which has THANKFULLY failed to take hold in music services).
Movies are also somewhat different than music, in that movies cost far more to produce and have very little value once they’ve been seen. Albums drive people to concerts and merchandise, but most movies can’t get you into the theater AFTER you’ve seen it.
Netflix can’t have every movie... the price is too low for the movies to recoup their budgets and marketing costs.
Digital rentals, like iTunes rentals should have replaced Blockbuster, letting the free market determine which movies succeed, but Netflix killed the whole concept. Now we as viewers rely on Netflix to curate (and now create) for us... and us lower-rung creators better work with them rather than against them, as we don’t have a market.
My movie was on three streaming services by the way... for years... and the total license fees paid was under $20,000. For unlimited views on several services at the same time.
So that’s the at-home movie market.
Back to piracy. It’s far worse than you think, number-wise. My movie was downloaded 100,000 times in 24 hours after a major piracy group (YIFY) released it. This same week, we made around $500 on iTunes. I totally get all the excuses, and that it doesn’t equate to actual lost rentals or sales, but I’ve consistently seen the ratio to be around 100 to 1 in favor of piracy. That’s a devastating ratio. I’d be ecstatic to see it go down to 10 to 1.
But I’d also be ecstatic to see a new paradigm come forward. Something from the studios and corporations who bicker at the top (the ones who still have theatrical cash they can count on). A true Spotify of movies. Indie filmmakers are currently stuck distributing within a system we can’t afford to fight over, but we also get hit the hardest by piracy, because we don’t have the theatrical window a Marvel movie has. We don’t have toys and merchandise.
On the plus side, I finally got to make another movie this year and actually got paid for my time making it. A monster movie too, with practical makeup effects. We were trying to get it made for 6 years and finally got funding, so it’s not all bad. But it’s also weird to think that there’s probably a 33% chance we’ll eventually have to sell it to Netflix exclusively, as we owe our investors to take the best deal. And if that happens, we’ll just be further perpetuating piracy by walling off our own movie. I see the writing on the wall though... I want to work WITH them.
EDIT: I just want to add that we’re not just waiting around for big corporations to fix things. We negotiated back the rights to sell our movie direct without DRM for a flat $5 as a way to combat mismatched pricing from service to service, and as a **** you to DRM, which does nothing (we were first pirated within an hour of release and the source of the leak was iTunes, which has some of the strictest DRM). We raised money to release our second movie via Creative Commons on YouTube and torrents that we personally seeded, so that it would then be free forever. So we’re definitely trying to move things forward ourselves and not just waiting for Hollywood to figure it out.
