Time Warner, Disney, Viacom Lose $3.5 Billion

[jetje]

nice read on piracy (http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nifea&&sid=a3REW5hf9CJM) from Bloomberg.com

[Tikibonbon]

I sure wish that I could find some of these DVD quality cams......

[tracydani]

Originally posted by Tikibonbon@4 July 2004 - 23:18
I sure wish that I could find some of these DVD quality cams......
LOL, some of these theater pirated movies are better then the dvd rips I have. Spiderman 2 was far better then the rip of another movie I just watched.

TD

[RealitY]

Very Nice Read...

[Switeck]

I have a BEEF with this title:
"Time Warner, Disney, Viacom Lose $3.5 Billion, to Film Pirates"

They do nothing to QUANTIFY/QUALIFY how they arrived at this $3.5 billion figure.

When megacorps can go before Congress and make up their own losses without saying these are merely 'estimated losses', it is a bold-faced lie used to JUSTIFY all sorts of intrusions and destructions of privacy, decency, and freedom of speech.

This is a LOT better, but still lacking in why they arrive at that conclusion:
"As Internet access gets faster and video compression improves, downloaders may steal a third of the studios' annual revenue -- that would be $3.7 billion for Time Warner alone -- making many of them unprofitable."

Revenue is not equal to profits!

In a world where any company making REAL things, a profit margin of 4% is considered "good" and 20% is considered "incredible".
But 'virtual' goods, even if sold as physical items, have been known to incur >100% profit margins.
A movie that takes $120 million to make, expensive though that 'initial investment' is, often grosses 2x that in the theaters and often equally if not moreso once released on DVD and VHS.
And after that, although sales usually dwindle, the overhead costs are so negligible that every sale by that point is almost entirely profit.

Must be nice, compaired to other industries that are in the red up to their eyeballs, which are having to shave fractions of pennies out of dollars -- just to survive.