They keep churning out utter crap, and they’re terrified that people will pirate it… even though they’re making more profits now than ever before in their history.
Here’s the latest way they’re annoying people in the name of anti-piracy:
Couldn’t help but notice while watching The Day After Tomorrow, Memorial Day’s cheesy $100 million hit, that an anti-piracy code is built into the movie. You can see the brown stripe whiz by on-screen just before the Soviet ship enters flooded Manhattan. This way, studios can track where a bootleg print came from.
A commenter on that quoted a Roger Ebert column:
“Have you been seeing spots when you go to the movies? It may not be your eyes! More than 20 years ago Kodak devised a system called “Cap Code” designed to uniquely mark film prints so that pirated copies could be traced to the source. Cap Code uses very tiny dots that flash occasionally but are so small that the average viewer almost never notices them.
Well, something new and horrible has been introduced on some studios’ prints. Sort of a giant picture-marring version of Cap Code dots: Very large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area. They flash in various patterns throughout a given reel while other reels of the same film may have none at all.”
I rarely go to the movies anymore, partly because I hate going alone; but mostly because I got tired of paying $10 to sit through 10 minutes of commercials. Oh, and also because there are damn few movies worth watching. Hollywood needs to get a grip here. They’re driving us out of the theatres with high prices, ads and “Cap Codes,” and then they worry that we’ll pirate the movies? Maybe if they made the theatre experience more attractive, they wouldn’t have to worry.
Of course, they’re raking in the cash hand over fist on DVDs, which proves a couple of things: people will pay a reasonable price for entertainment (it’s cheaper to buy a DVD than actually go to the theater); and you can (usually) skip the commercials on the DVD, which leads to a better experience.
Frankly, it’s also cheaper to buy a DVD than to pirate the movie. I don’t believe that piracy is really a significant threat to movies (unlike music), at least now.
So, why do they treat all their customers like criminals? Not what I’d call customer-friendly.
