In Japan, cinema releases are regularly 9-12 months behind DVD-quality bittorrent releases. I recently saw a rental DVD in the 'new releases' section which I'd

In Japan, cinema releases are regularly 9-12 months behind DVD-quality bittorrent releases. I recently saw a rental DVD in the 'new releases' section which I'd rented 3 years earlier outside of Japan. Similarly, my wife loves Desperate Housewives, but Japanese releases are 18+ months after the American release. I have two choices - I can download a movie right now in around 10 minutes without getting off the couch, and watch it in widescreen/surround in the comfort of my home, or I can wait a year or more to pay $22 to see it at the cinema. By the time that year is up, if I've somehow managed to avoid reading spoilers online, and waited months after the rest of the world has stopped talking about the movie, there's a chance I might even enjoy the trip to the cinema. I would love to be able to pay $10 to get a decent quality download at the same time the rest of the world is watching a movie. Hell, I'd probably pay $20 if it was something I really wanted to see - it'd still be cheaper than the cinema. If iTunes Japan had a rental section (or if the local online rental stores were up-to-date with the rest of the world) I'd probably be spending hundreds of dollars a year on it. I realize it's probably fiendishly complicated to take an English-language movie, negotiate multiple foreign release dates, translate it, subtitle it, market it in the local language etc, but it seems like it should be fairly easy to allow a non-US English-speaker to buy a (DRMed if necessary) downloadable copy of a movie online a reasonable time after it's been released in the states. It takes the production companies a year, yet two days after a new episode of Lost has aired in the states there'll be multiple fan-subbed versions doing the rounds on Japanese p2p networks. I have no idea how to fix the current system (and I'm sure smarter people than me have tried and failed), but I can't help but feel these companies are missing a huge opportunity internationally.