With the uprise of digital cinema, movie companies are looking into different ways to distribute digital movies. One of the best alternatives is obviously BitTorrent. Using BitTorrent to distribute digital movies will reduce distribution costs to nearly 0$.
This means that the movie industry could save up to 2000$ per copy. So sending out 1000 digital copies will save 2.000.000$ (cheaper tickets please).
This cost saving can be essential, especially for low-budget movies. Take a movie with a 2 million$ budget for example. Distributing the actual prints for wide release will be 100% or more of the total budget. This will never happen; the movie will go straight to TV or DVD instead. But by distributing the film though bittorrent this will be no problem at all.
And it’s not only the distribution that’s cheaper (wiki):
Digital cinema has some big economic advantages over film, being very cheap compared to film. For instance Rick McCallum, a producer on Attack of the Clones, said that it cost US$16,000 for 220 hours of digital tape where a comparable amount of film would have cost US$1.8 million. Obviously this matters most to low-budget films which are often shot for a few million dollars or less.
Wait a second; am I going to watch a cheap xvid rip in a movie theatre?
No, not exactly. A proper digital movie will be around 120 GB per hour (33 MB/s). In order to send it the movie must be compressed and encrypted (see DCDM format). We need it to be save, we don’t want any 200GB movies showing up at mininova or the piratebay.
But there is more.
BitTorrent will not only be cost saving, it will be also a lot faster. Of course the movie theatres should get a decent line, but with a 100Mbps connection a 200GB movie would take less than 8 hours to distribute. Without BitTorrent online distribution would be nearly impossible, imagine 1000 theatres downloading a 200GB movie from 1 host.
So please stop complaining about piracy and decreasing sales and do something, welcome to the wonderful world of BitTorrent.
