Armageddon for the movie industry

For some time now, I’ve been pondering a dystopian vision of the future where any entertainment content that can be digitized — music, movies, books — ends up being pirated and thus no longer generates revenue. The end result of this being that these industries shrink substantially. We’re already seeing this process in regards to music. I suspect we’ll soon see it for e-books. With movies and television it’s been less of an issue because it’s still a substantial hassle to download a video as either a movie file or bit torrent. However, a new article in the LA Times says that the advent of streaming pirated video is alleviating this hassle.

Megavideo and other sites like it offer a vast unauthorized selection of popular television shows and movies that can be watched with the click of a mouse, using the same streaming technology found on mainstream sites like CNN or Hulu. It demands none of the time or technical sophistication required to download a video file via BitTorrent or other file-sharing technology.

The fear is nonetheless palpable throughout the entertainment industry. Executives worry that improvements in Internet speeds and in the software that compresses movie files into easy-to-distribute packages are making matters worse.

“It’s made streaming a lot less clunky than it was even three years ago,” said Darcy Antonellis, president of Warner Bros. Technical Operations.

Of course, a world without music, movies and stories is a world without magic. I suspect the children of tomorrow will grow up emotionally vacant and spiritually null. We will gaze into their eyes and see only a blank empty soul gazing back at us. If you want to spare yourself this agony, I suggest you kill yourself right now by eating a flaming stick of dynamite.

5 thoughts on “Armageddon for the movie industry

  1. Wil Post author

    Sounds familiar, but that’s the kind of name that would sound familiar even if I hadn’t heard it before.

  2. John Saleeby

    That’s the danger of naming your band after common nouns like The Crocodiles or The Cars. You want to name your Pop Combo something snazzy like The Buzzcocks or The Dead Boys.

    I called in Sick to work so I have a lot of time to think about important things.

    You know what would be a good name for a band? The Awful Truth. When I start my band I’m going to call it The Awful Truth.

    “The Awful Truth!”
    “Hi, this John.”
    “What’s going on, John?”
    “Uh . . . I’m sick and I can’t come to rehearsal today.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay . . . I’ll tell the guys.”
    “Sorry!”
    John hangs up phone.
    “Ah! Let’s see what’s going on today on the net . . . What? The Awful Truth has fired John Saleeby!?! ‘Awful Truth Guitarist Wil Forbis says ‘Saleeby is a dick!’ The band is replacing Saleeby with Mike The Situation. ‘We like his hair cut!'”

    I’m going to work.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *