Hollywood film studios claim to have gained from MegaUpload shutdown.
Two Hollywood film studios may have gained more than an extra $1 million a week from paid legal downloads of their movies after last year's shutdown of Kim Dotcom's MegaUpload websites, a new study has found.
The study, by Carnegie Mellon University's Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (Idea), estimates that
the MegaUpload shutdown in January last year boosted the two studios' revenues from online movie sales and rentals by 6 to 10 per cent over the subsequent 18 weeks.
Based on average prices of US$15 ($18) for each online purchase and US$4.50 ($5.44) for each rental, the shutdown lifted the two unnamed studios' online revenue by between US$1.1 million ($1.3 million) and US$1.9 million ($2.3 million) a week across the 12 countries where the studios had digital sales channels.
The estimated revenue gains provide the first solid data pointing to how much revenue the studios may have lost while MegaUpload existed, allowing users to upload copies of movies to the website and share links enabling other people to download them free.
New Zealand police arrested MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom and other executives in a helicopter raid on his Coatesville mansion north of Auckland in response to a charge of aiding copyright infringement issued by a US grand jury. At its peak MegaUpload accounted for 4 per cent of worldwide internet traffic.
