Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
yes, the get a piece of EVERY rental that's done. There is a back end program that tracks all the rentals and they get pennies back for each one.
Which is how Blockbuster and Hollywood Video can come out with HUNDREDS of copies of a movie, because they are tracked, a percentage of them saved for after rental resale, then the rest are destroyed to keep scarcity.
Even the small mom and pop stores have to keep track of the VHS/DVD rentals because that's how the system works. It doesn't work just this way in the US, but around the world.
|
I'm afraid you are partly wrong here Cynthetiq. Blockbuster deals with someone like Rentrak
www.newppt.com, They pay 2 dollars per movie and give Rentrak like 50% of the profits, after so many weeks they can sell the movie back to rentrak or put on it their shelves to sell it. That is how they can have 50 of the same movie. The studios may get profits from rentrak or they may just get a one time fee, I'm unsure how it works after that.
Mom and pop stores, like mine buy from places like Waxworks
http://www.waxworksonline.com/ We don't even deal with VHS anymore because they are too expensive(50-60$ sometimes) And the only real advantage to ordering from our distributor is the fact that we are guaranteed to get our movies and we get them a few days early. It's actually cheaper for us to drive to Wal-mart and buy them but we can't drive to walmart every Tuesday and they don't always have every movie released that day.
If you have multiple stores, mostly new inventory, and enough shelf space then there's a great advantage to joining someone like Rentrak, but if you have a single location and mostly existing inventory like just about every Mom and Pop video store, it becomes a hassle to keep your inventory seperate from theirs.
Back on topic:
Downloading in place of rental is just as bad as anything else. We bought 10 Shrek 2 dvds and a few VHS, and on Saturday night 3 of them had rented because everyone that came in had already seen a pirated copy.
Copyright Infringement is BASICALLY theft. It's intellectial PROPERTY that has an infinite amount of copies. When you take a copy the owner now has infinite -1 copies of this property. Copyright Infringement isn't any more legal than theft and they are very similar in nature, People say it's theft because theft is more understood than Copyright Infringment.
Copyright Infringement DOES hurt the MPAA and RIAA. Currently the pain is equivilent to a pin prick but the numbers were rising and pretty soon NO ONE would be buying CDs and DVDs. They took action early to stop this. I don't really agree with suing a 12 year old or grandmother for downloading 5-6 songs but some people were trading thousands of songs. I don't really like the way the RIAA does business but that doesn't mean depriving them of profits is any less illegal.
I know I'm forgetting something...