In a first of sorts, Warner has tied up with facebook to launch a special edition director’s cut version of the movie Watchmen. The blu-ray version of the movie will have capabilities of sharing the movie and comment on it in real time with your facebook buddies.
What it means is this – Every friend of yours will have to have the original blu-ray version of the movie and agree to watch the movie at the same time. Warner is already running a live community screening feature with its blu-ray format movies but so far, the interactions are limited to within the BD-live community of Warner. Now, the same features are being extended to your entire friends’ network over Facebook.
How well this will do is yet to be seen, but from an India perspective, I am skeptical of this catching up anytime soon. The reasons are obvious – the blu-ray players are not easily available, the media itself is not imported and made available to the masses.
However, while reading about this development, I was also thinking about the recent row between the movie producers and movie-hall owners of the country. Each group wants a larger share of the pie, with the hall-owners demanding a pay for performance model and the producers refusing to part with their commissions.
I also know of people that download a bunch of movies in their DVD formats (illegally of course) and burn them on DVDs to share with friends. This implies that there is a sizeable amount of broadband capacity available with people to download movies. Success of youtube in India (it’s actually a failure, of sorts!!) clearly demonstrates that online video is here to stay.
An idea comes to mind. Why don’t the producers and cinema hall owners come together to develop technology that delivers real time streaming movies to people’s homes? The quality of course would suffer, but at a lower cost, people wouldn’t mind the pleasure of watching a movie as it is released, online at a fee.
Considering the fact that DTH is already very interactive, why wouldn’t movies be released on DTH or over broadband in sync with your social network so that all of you can watch it together embedded in facebook?
Eventually, the margins for both parties can be protected thus, without incurring any costs on running large properties. I am sure, people like me love going out for that occasional movie over a weekend, but I do end up missing quite a few because of my time commitments. If I was able to view some over my broadband at the same time as it’s showing in the theatre, I would love it. My view is that the footfalls will not get affected at all, and the cinema hall owners can actually keep updating their theatres with more movies every week, rather than running empty seats after the first week of release.
Food for thought Mr. Ajay Bijli, are you listening? Is someone at DTH companies working on integrating TV programs with social networking sites?
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I do agree with you Mr. Bansal. We guys in India still get the online free copies of the movies after a week or so over the net. I know initially the quality is very bad but as the films get older you start getting good prints also. So, instead of peoples in India downloading and sharing the movies illegally why not make absolutely legal and provide good quality movies on the net from the very first day and have another way of increasing on their revenues.