See any new theatrical release online free!
Posted by Pat Kitano at 11/25/2007 1:18 PM 
Categories: New Business Models, Disintermediation, The Future
Categories: New Business Models, Disintermediation, The Future
Did you know you can now watch just released feature films free without interruptions on new online movie sites that are as easy to use as YouTube? I didn't know until yesterday.
Hollywood and the MPAA may as well give up. Free feature length films online were the final pot of gold in the war on online piracy. Finally, the Pandora's Box of free online movies, served up instantly in streaming format, has opened and is proliferating.
The masses, including me, have heard and read about pirated movies offered up via Torrents and other file sharing protocols but have abstained from downloading these properties due to: 1) illegality, 2) threat of viruses and other malware within the download, and 3) well publicized lawsuits by the MPAA against individuals who were caught file sharing.
Now, sites like Movies-on-Demand.tv, Online Cinema.org and Movie6.net make watching streamed full length features as simple and safe as watching YouTube. It does this without any downloading, without cutting the movie into 10-minute segments, and without popup ads... and it looks as good as Netflix's streaming video service. More significantly, anyone can build a similar free movie site using a blog platform and cut/paste html code - Movie6 is built on Wordpress - so proliferation of these sites is all but assured as a manifestation of user generated content.
For example, Transparent or any blog can act as a link distributor of the newly released Enchanted movie (I'll take this down in one week, it's here to prove a point):
Watch Enchanted (2007) Online Here!
When YouTube was purchased by Google last year, their first order of business was to purge copyright material like Warner Bros. cartoons, but a simple search on YouTube today will reveal that enforcement is lax. The fundamental operating principle now seems to be that so many individuals are uploading copyrighted content to tens of thousands of video sites, it's impossible to stop.
What really surprises me is the complete lack of media attention towards these consumer-friendly streaming movie sites... leading tech resources like Techcrunch and Techmeme, and journalistic media like the New York Times or WSJ, make no mention of them. (The closest the NYT gets to streaming movies is its January 2007 article on Netflix's new streaming movie service ). With no evidence of publicity, I'm assuming these sites (here's a list of 28 of them) are still at the word-of-mouth marketing stage (that's how I found out about them)... or more intriguing, just being ignored for the time being by media giants (perhaps to avoid further attention to these sites?)
Although Hollywood seem to be ignoring the streaming movie sites, they do go after Chinese download cafes in Shanghai. Does that make sense? To politicize piracy while the same piracy happens in the homeland?
I knew there were a number ways for people to steal movies via peer to peer sites etc., I had no idea that there were so many sites that actually stream stolen content.
When you shop at a retailer, a good portion of the retail price you pay for something offsets the expense of "shrinkage", a sanitized term for stolen merchandise. Consumers who prefer to acquire their digital media legally can look forward to increased prices while the owners of intellectual property try to clamp down on theft of their work products.
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Disturbing, but interesting. I'll take your word for it that Enchanted is viewable. Having been on both sides of the lens I won't watch out of principle. All that goes through my mind is that someone is losing the ability to feed their family. You may be onto something about why these sites are not being covered. However, a critical mass will hit, and they will have all the attention they deserve. From both the media and the authorities.
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Authorities? You mean the same people who believe they are winning the war on drugs, the war in Iraq, and making friends all over the world--those authorities?
Let's be real for a moment. Hollywood should be no different than any other industry. If your "property" is under attack by the public then you need to change how you distribute the property.
Realtors could have avoided all of the same problems if they had just shared MLS information rather than hording it. That mentality has led many Realtors to pay of their lead generation.
Can't shed a tear over Hollywood having myself been connected to the record industry and seen the movie industry up close.
Some how they will make it.
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