Film Factory Losses: is BitTorrent a Major Responsible?

Abstract

Online piracy is an important challenge in the motion-pictures industry. Several studies have claimed that unauthorized content in online venues are reducing substantially the Box Office revenues while few other studies were not in favor of this claim. To understand better the impact of this phenomena early years, a study based on a large dataset is needed to analyze how different portals (e.g. BitTorrent) permitted movie downloads that help to increase revenue movie industry and it is also important to identify what type of movies were mainly affected. This paper aims to answer this question based on a dataset containing almost 15 million records obtained from around 3.25 million torrents' data collected from the BitTorrent portal and their detailed movie related records extracted from IMDB. In this study, we observe (i) the impact of online movie downloads on movie revenues in early years, which predominantly affect on low budget and independent movies, (ii) the correlation between screen period of movies in cinema to the availability of torrents, (iii) the fake torrents that are injected to the portals before and during the screen period of a movie. Apart from that this work analyses the movie viewer's feedbacks gathered from a questionnaire survey on user opinion and experiences about online movie downloads. We explored that, people used to be aware more about the online downloads and their related portals after introducing anti-piracy laws than before. We also suggest several other ways to help reducing online download rates of movies.