7 ms·

Movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenue

• keiferkif 3y ago
  news flash: Popular movies are popular
• eli 3y ago
  The movies that people most want to see are the movies that people most want to see.
  • grotorea 3y ago
    It could be possible that different movies could be popular with different groups. Say, imagine a hypothetical movie really popular with teenagers with Internet access but not enough money for tickets, compared with another movie that is really popular with rural people with no broadband but who visit town in the weekend for fun. We might see differences. But yeah, for the real interesting questions we would need to get the data for movies that are not available by piracy but are available in theaters.
  • cantSpellSober 3y ago
    That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow? > The data covers multiple methods of unlicensed content delivery including Streaming, P2P Torrents, Web Downloads and Stream-ripper sites We're just assuming that the audience using these sites is the exact same audience as the comparison? > cinema revenue at the individual premises and film-title level [in the North American market] I think one audience learns about a new movie on a torrent site and then goes to see it in the theatre. (Another audience never uses torrent sites. Another uses them but rarely goes to the theatre, etc) If there's statistically significant data about the first audience (as the article claims), that's interesting.
    • aidenn0 3y ago
      > We're just assuming that the audience using these sites is the exact same audience as the comparison? No, we are assuming they are highly correlated.
      • cantSpellSober 3y ago
        No we aren't, the authors of the study argue that they are based on their data
        • aidenn0 3y ago
          Which is not at all surprising from my personal experience. It's not like people who use torrent sites live in a completely different world from those who don't. The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me, except in a few cases (e.g. I would believe that some limited release movies might get exposure via piracy causing a wider release) that are more the exception than the rule.
          • cantSpellSober 3y ago
            I agree, we aren't "assuming they are highly correlated," as you said. > The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me Me too! It would be interesting if it did however; I can imagine a case where a user of an unlicensed site learned about a movie there and wanted to see it on the big screen. If you read the study they don't argue that however.
            • aidenn0 3y ago
              I misinterpreted your comment that I first responded to as arguing that.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      > That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow? Indeed, this is at the top of the article (emphasis mine): > New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too.
      • cantSpellSober 3y ago
        Thanks I read the article. From the study: > Thus there is a very strong, statistically significant, positive correlation between Box Office revenue and unlicensed consumption
        • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
          I am not sure of your point. What is the significance of that statement if not to say that increases in "unlicensed consumption" don't decrease box office revenue? The fact that they have a positive correlation is kinda the default; one doesn't affect the other and there's likely instead some other cause for the statistically significant correlation, such as popularity.
          • cantSpellSober 3y ago
            It's not my point, the significance is listed under Conclusions.
            • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
              Sorry for the confusion. Stepping back to my initial reply, you asked: > That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow? And I intended to answer the question with how their statement is related to the article by pointing out that this statement is written at the start of the article: > New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too. I didn't understand your point when you responded by saying: > Thanks I read the article. From the study: >> Thus there is a very strong, statistically significant, positive correlation between Box Office revenue and unlicensed consumption What is the significance of the statement you quoted as a reply to mine? That's what I don't follow. (Thanks for the time you've taken so far with your replies!)
  • Adverblessly 3y ago
    I assume what they are going for is that if they were inversely correlated it would imply that movie piracy drives down box office revenue (since you could say "the more pirated a movie is, the lower its box office revenue"). Since they aren't, it implies that piracy does not significantly cause reduced box office revenue. I've brought it up a few times before, but you can read about another study here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 that assuming my previous comment on it was correct found for example that every pirated movie is 0.27 of a lost sale, whereas every pirated video game is actually 0.24 of an extra sale. If 0.27 was actually 1 or more, then a result like the linked study would have been more surprising for example.
    • cantSpellSober 3y ago
      I don't think so, this is a study from a marketing company. This is essentially an ad for their services, which monitor activity on unlicensed sites (I gather): > The combination of Box Office revenue data and unlicensed consumption data would provide a holistic view of film consumption
      • Adverblessly 3y ago
        Sorry for being unclear, by "what they are going for" I meant why TorrentFreak chose to post about this study, not why the study was made in the first place.
• moffkalast 3y ago
  Movie publishers you heard it here first: Piracy causes high box office turnout. Kidding aside, is it that surprising that the theatre viewing rate matches the home viewing rate? Both are just the same indicator of popularity.
  • thelastparadise 3y ago
    Typical home movie night experience with my family: - Pay to "rent" movie from service A, paying full price. - Find out service A decides we are not allowed to have HD on our device even though it's 2023 and we have plenty of bandwidth and pixels - Try renting on service B. Find out that our ISP is throttling service B to 2.5 mbps and we only can watch in stuttering potato quality. - Give up and search for magnet link. Wait about 30 seconds and we can start watching the high bitrate blu ray rip that looks and runs better than anything we paid for. And so we research how to set up jellyfin and the *arr suite and use that from then on, plus we can share wuth with the extended family to spare them this negative experience.
    • PaulHoule 3y ago
      To be fair, if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right, not to mention you might download some Chinese movie called "Nezha" and really get some other movie called "Ne Zha", on the other hand I am used to buying physical copies of Chinese movies that allegedly have English subtitles and don't (... I want to watch Investiture of the Gods so badly) or the Chinese movies that come from China that were made with DVD+R, printed on with inkjet, and have subtitles that barely make sense.
      • slau 3y ago
        You might want to check the RAM or disk on your seedbox. My friend tells me that in a decade of seedbox usage, my friend has had maybe 3-5 lemons with data corruption. Edit: Clarified that it’s my friend who has a seedbox.
        • 3y ago
• thelastparadise 3y ago
  Maybe I'm getting old, but what I would really prefer is that we could get some good movies, even if they touch on uncomfortable or ugly topics. Movies like American History X, Fight Club, or What's Eating Gilbert Grape. It seems these movies would no longer be "allowed" to be made, or perhaps the modern zeitgeist censors them away. I just want to celebrate and encourage bona fide art and see more of it in the world. And I would gladly pay for my family to access this higher quality art.
  • exodust 3y ago
    > It seems these movies would no longer be "allowed" to be made It may seem that way but I doubt it. I have faith in and trust artists, writers and film-makers to think outside the box. It's their job, and passion to do that. There will always be "safe", bland movies and TV among the good stuff.
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Many (many) years ago I had an "agree to disagree" discussion with a co-worker about whether Romper Stomper was a good movie or not. She couldn't get past the ugliness of the content to see that it was 'a good movie' about bad things / people / situations. Alien 3 is also one of those, I think. I love it, but it's dark and dreary and hopeless - in fact, because of that.
  • beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Why does it seem that way to you? I have not quite noticed that. I think when you are younger, there are movies that profoundly affect you. When you get older, and you have seen a lot of movies, its rarer to get the same kind of feelings. But that's just a part of growing up, it isn't a problem of censorship. I wonder even if, upon re-watching now, you'd think Fight Club is really the pinnacle of edginess and a profound art you attribute to it now, or if maybe you were just young when you watched it. And I also wonder if there are some great, profound works being made now that, for whatever reason, you have simply missed or felt the need not to see. Is "American History X" really leagues above "How To Blow up a Pipeline" in terms of "uncomfortable and ugly topics"? What about "Beau is Afraid"? Is that one censored by the modern zeitgeist? What about the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, Harmony Korine, or Nicolas Winding Refn? Trying honestly, its hard for me to pinpoint what in particular you might think is censored these days. People are definitely still making good, uncomfortable movies. Edit with a few more directors making really great, messed up things at the moment: Julia Ducournau, Gaspar Noé, Rick Alverson, Boots Riley. Have you watched any Cronenberg lately? Lars von Trier? Haneke? What about recent Verhoeven films?? What about Paul Schrader? Bong Joon-ho? If these people are being censored, well, they are still definitely making some Art within those restrictions.
• deleted 3y ago
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• raydiatian 3y ago
  There’s some economic idea I heard a long time back whenever I hear about piracy, where basically the argument for allowing piracy of digital goods is “well, the majority of digital pirates lack the income to be honest customers in the first place; even if you managed to stop 100% of digital piracy, you’re not going to find any residual revenue.” I don’t know how I feel about it, but it always intrigued me.
  • k__ 3y ago
    Probably a plausible deniability issue. If you wouldn't prohibit piracy, it would become normal and the people who could pay stop paying too.
    • unaindz 3y ago
      In Spain is legal to download and share but people often pay for it anyway. As Gabe Newell said the best way to combat video game piracy is by offering consumers better service than what they might receive from pirates. Piracy is not a pricing issue, but rather a service problem.
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    I think it has limited truth. Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there. On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.) Movies/TV are somewhere in the middle. I think a lot of people pirate because the content they want to watch is spread out among so many services that need separate subscriptions. You can't pay for all of them all the time when you go for months without touching some of them, but constantly canceling and resubscribing is madness. Also dealing with the nonsense that Netflix won't display high-quality resolution on all external displays, etc.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      >On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.) Hi! Nice to meet you. With the much derided (on HN) monthly plan, I have been paying for Photoshop (and its cohorts) for my own personal use without an employer paying for it. I even have a paid for version of Office. In fact, I no longer have any software illicitly obtained. It's either a fully paid version or something offered for free. Why? Because I can afford it in direct counter to your argument.
• PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  This has been true for 20+ years. The biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders on content. All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less. These media cartels are going the way of the dinosaur anyway, both with AI generation supplanting them in the next decade (Alexa, generate a crossover episode of SVU and the X-Files), and 'piracy' being normalized with each new generation.
  • MPSimmons 3y ago
    >All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less. I always assumed it was about control, given how media companies constantly attempt to provide alternative methods of distributing media, though only within their very narrow definitions, and how they fight so hard against anything that breaks their control. CSS, Sony's CD root kit, HDCP, etc etc etc
  • billy99k 3y ago
    "All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less." I disagree. Big movie studios can write off piracy, but independent movie studios, with much smaller budgets, can't. It's the same in the music industry. I knew lots of independent artists in the early 2000s that basically had no career after Napster because nobody would buy their music anymore (but those same people continued to download/listen to it). They also couldn't tour to make a living, because large companies control all of the major venues. Piracy has forced independent artists to go to large studios to make a living, contributing to the enshitification of the current state of music (and movies).
    • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      Small movie studios, if they make good content, people will go and pay to see. It's no different. If people pirate it, word of mouth spreads and people will go and see it. No one really buys music anyway, artists make most of their money from shows. Sharing is normal behavior, the whole concept of piracy as stealing is bananas. No one has a right to charge for every single copy of something in existence, not when it can be easily duplicated. It's entirely at odds with human nature.
• seydor 3y ago
  Correlation ergo causation
• tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Ylpertnodi 3y ago
    [flagged]
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Pirates and payers see ads at the same time, they go to their respective avenues to watch
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• daft_pink 3y ago
  Popular things that people want are stolen more often... so what? Correlation is not causation. Piracy is theft, but it's pretty minor shouldn't be a felony and the harm is a dollar or two at most for movies and music per user and shouldn't be harshly penalized and thus probably isn't worth the studios or attorneys time to bother with.
  • FireInsight 3y ago
    Piracy is not theft, it does not take away the item from it's "owner" or rightsholder. It's not even using a paid service without paying, because privacy is provided for free or in exchange for ad revenue by different people than who provide the paid services. Really, the only thing digital piracy is is digital piracy; consuming content that it's rightsholder would want you to pay for before accessing.
  • lazide 3y ago
    The issue of course is for the studio, any piracy is sign of a huge problem they need to clamp down on (leaking potential revenue). And easy to blame missed numbers/targets. And they have money, and usually a coherent voice. Where for the audience, any amount of piracy which doesn’t visibly and reliably kill new movies they want to watch is perfectly fine. Even desirable.
  • LocalH 3y ago
    Piracy is not theft. Theft requires the owner be deprived of the thieved property. Piracy does not do that. If a pirate duplicates a work, no lawful owner of a physical copy, nor rights holder, is deprived of that work. The rightsholders still have it. They can still legally duplicate it and sell it. Piracy is copyright infringement, which is a completely separate legal and moral concept. My question to you is - if I could duplicate a physical object you own, with no harm or deprivation suffered by you, should that be a crime?
    • lesuorac 3y ago
      Well this is splitting hairs imo. Assault isn't theft either but Piracy and Assault are still both crimes. Somebody who sells say photographs is _harmed_ by you just using your phone to take a picture print it out later without paying them anything. It's their livelihood. However, whether is the crime of piracy worth the current penalties? No. They're excessive and that's what the parent was saying.
• numeromancer 3y ago
  Or, perhaps, piracy measurement is link to box office revenue.
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  When I see threads like this, it just makes me think that we need copyright reform. It's like the film industry has had its way for too long, and we need to change a few of the rules to make content consumption a little more consumer friendly. Otherwise, consumers are going to keep pulling out their eye patches if we continue to let the content industry believe they are in 100% control of where, when, and how you consume their content.
  • intothemild 3y ago
    I was watching a Patrick Willems video this week, and he made a point about what happened during the pandemic with movie streaming. That the direct to stream films actually did way way worse than you'd imagine. I thought that say the Pixar movies he gave examples of would have done better than they did, but actually, No. He says that because they were placed alongside everything else... they didn't do as well because the marketing wasn't the same.
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  People are stealing our 1m measuring sticks, but nobody takes these 63cm sticks for the same price? Hmm.. I know what to do! Put ads via stickers all over them right before we sell them! Surely this will decrease theft!
• o0banky0o 3y ago
  Torrentfreak's twitter account is still being squatted on by some POS, since august. It seems like they ran out of steam trying to get it back