Peter Griffin: It's time for Hollywood to embrace the internet

It's film festival time again and as the Wellington theatres show the best new independent movies from home and abroad I'll become a nightshift worker so I can get to the less-crowded daytime screenings of the dozen or so I want to see.

I am not too keen on watching 12 in the space of two weeks. I like to savour the memory of a movie for a few days, think about its themes, reconstruct my favourite scenes in my head. There won't be much time for that before I'm on to the next one.

In fact, I'd have scheduled just a handful of screenings were it not for the fact that it could be six to nine months before some of the films get a wider theatrical release here. Most of them, bar the local offerings, will go to DVD but only when the movie has had its theatrical debut in every other film market.

The thing is, I want to see them now. I will gladly pay a fair price for them, but I'm also happy to use my high-speed internet connection to download them and my LCD flat screen TV to watch them in my home.

I'm dying to see Al Gore's documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. If it was available to New Zealanders as a reasonably priced legal download, it would be on my hard drive right now.

But the following quote from the movie describes the film industry as well as it does the global disaster we are motoring towards: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

Despite some progress - Steven Soderbergh's simultaneous release of Bubble at cinemas, on HDNet cable TV and DVD being one - the film industry is still terrified of the implications of releasing its movies worldwide on multiple formats, all at once.

The success of the film industry depends on its ability to keep us all waiting with bated breath for the next cinema release. The record-breaking box office success of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest shows Hollywood still has the power to do this.

But there's a lot of cost in the delivery chain between us, the paying viewers, and the movie studios. There are distributors who sell the movies into each territory and exhibitors - the people who show the movies in theatres. The studios want a triple-shot every time they put a movie out - the initial buzz when it hits the big screen, a further boost when it goes out on DVD and a resurrection for its pay TV or free-to-air TV debut.

The industry is by and large unconvinced that the cost-savings in marketing and distribution in a big-bang release of a movie would make it more profitable than the conventional staggered release.

But the industry as a whole is short-sighted. The big-bang release would be equally if not more profitable - as long as the movie is good. The fact that a large number of the movies released each year are arguably less than good makes the industry's reluctance to embrace the simultaneous release model a little easier to understand.

I don't think every movie would work as a simultaneous, multi-format global release. I'll always want to sink into a soft leather seat at the Embassy to watch the more visually impressive ones.

But in the case of festival offerings like Michael Winterbottom's TV docudrama The Road to Guantanamo I'll happily watch it at home as a download. Winterbottom outdid Soderbergh with Guantanamo, making it available for download on the internet and on DVD on the same day as its Channel 4 debut in Britain in March.

These innovative moves into online distribution by film-makers and production companies are heartening, but the film industry is still scared of the internet. It's scared, despite glaring evidence that the internet will be its primary medium in the future.

Video streaming website Youtube.com, which delivers over 100 million video views every day, has been very successful. The videos are typically only a few minutes long and of degraded quality, but it shows a huge number of web users are comfortable watching video online. Google Video is just one other major example.

Apple is expected next month to join other movie download vendors when it starts offering movie rental downloads through its iTunes.com online store. It appears downloads won't be available as permanent one-off downloads as Apple seeks to quash the movie industry's fear of piracy and lost retail sales.

In a move to make movie downloads more convenient to watch, download site Movielink has partnered with CD and there's copyright protection software to stop multiple copies being burned. It all points to the fact that in future, all over the world, people will be watching new release movies on their TVs at home while others are watching the same movies in theatres. The sooner we have that sort of choice the better.