Podcast: Episode 4

For years, the people who make and sell films have done everything in their power to stop potential movie audiences getting hold of their products and swapping them for free on the internet.

Now it seems they're giving up the battle and embracing the technology to distribute the films over the net themselves.

The major Hollywood studio, Warner Brothers, has announced it's to start selling downloads of films over the internet through a deal with the web company BitTorrent.

Warner Brothers says computer users will be able to buy films and television shows on the same day that they become available on DVD, but they'll only play on the computer that was used to download them.

How exactly will that work?

Anthony Capstick is a new technology consultant.

It's going to work by making the file that contains the picture available over a technology which is using Broadband to enable you to download and share large files on what they call a peer-to-peer basis.

Who's going to pay for it then?

People will pay a fee for the recordings themselves over the internet by credit card.

But what's to stop them then just passing it on to other people who don't pay a fee?

Well, the same could be said of music, as in people who download music from iTunes.

But the agreement between Warner Brothers and BitTorrent is that they are disabling that ability to copy files from one to the other.

Of course, people will find a way around that so that they'll probably disable that function.

But I think...

That's not been the experience with iTunes.

People are not using that as a way to distribute music.

They're using it as a way of conveniently getting hold of a good quality recording.

And I think that's the key to this, that the official channel of getting hold of a recording of a film will be a much higher quality than a pirate copy.

People who make films have been resisting this for a very long time.

They've been fighting against it.

Why have they now embraced it?

Well, I think what's happened is that they've seen what's happened with music.

In the early days, the recording studios and the publishers of music really just sort of thought that this new technology would all go away and they could just ignore it.

And when they saw the sales of CDs just plummeting because people were using the Internet to copy and download pirate versions,

they realized that they had to do something about it.

And I think the iTunes technology has really sort of made people realize that there is a commercial opportunity out there.

And that if people are prepared to pay quite a lot of money...

...for ringtones, why not also pay that money for good quality recordings of music?

Doesn't it mean, though, that people will eventually stop going to see movies, stop going to buy DVDs and just get it through the Internet, and that the industry will suffer because of that?

Well, that's not been the experience, really, has it, at the box office?

I mean, there's still record numbers of people going to see films as they come out.

I think what's likely to happen, particularly as broadband rolls out...

...there will be a move away from...

...buying DVDs.

People will download through the telephone lines direct to the house the copy of the film.

So I think it's DVDs that will ultimately suffer rather than the box office.

It's interesting, though, isn't it, that the companies that have done the conventional thing of making the film or making the music, as with CDs,

are sort of following the technology, aren't they?

They're having to keep up with the technology.

Yeah, and I think there's a real move towards looking at opportunities rather than sort of being in defensive mode and just burying the head...

...in the sand like an ostrich and thinking it'll all go away, because it won't go away.

New technology consultant, Anthony Campstig.