Camcorder Video Piracy In India And Who It Affects The Most

Imagine watching a movie on the computer. The opening credits roll. There is a slight shakiness, a few “zoom ins” or “zoom outs” and the texture of the print is quite grainy, but eventually the monitor seems to fit in the entire frame of the movie screen. Welcome to the world of 'cam print' movies. It's prevalent all over the world, but in India, a film-crazy nation, it takes on a whole new persona of its own.

In India, the Hindi and the Tamil movie industry have hegemony over the rest when it comes to numbers. The fact that these industries also churn out a massive number of movies every year, most of which are targeted to lower middle class income groups, or as the producers like to call it, the masses, make the piracy scene even more intriguing. Here's how – India does not make too many films that are visual extravaganzas. By that I mean, a movie that releases on a Friday and if it's not an Interstellar or an Avatar, won't really compel people to wait and get tickets a week later. They'd want to “check it out” as soon as a cam print is released. This way, they save a whole lot of money, which is a huge deal here.

But here's the thing – with the rise of the multiplex culture in the country and a growing young earning class, most of the urban youth now has access to most films. About 4-5 years ago, the scene was different. Only the metros would get access to the blockbusters while tier-II and tier-III towns would usually have to wait three or six months before they could get any chances to screen the films. And this resulted in a higher demand for pirated copies. The main reason was that back then they used physical prints while today the theaters mainly use digital prints which cost about 1/5^th of their reel counterparts.

So, yes, it is true that the frequency of camcorder piracy in India has gone down. There has been a 16% drop in the entire Asia Pacific region from last year. In India, as opposed to 44 cases of camcorder piracy, there were 40 this year. One of the major breakthroughs this year was the arrest and subsequent shutdown of piracy teams like Yamraaj and NickkkDoN, both from Indore. It is interesting to know that Indore is a tier-II town, a place where the culture of camcorder piracy is not new. It's just that earlier they were mostly pirating Indian films, but now, with the arrival of multiplexes, they are pirating Hollywood films too.

How seriously is the camcorder piracy movement hurting the coffers of the film studios? As it turns out, and this is quite interesting, it's mainly the two extreme ends of the movie budget spectrum that are hurting the most. Small-time Bollywood filmmakers and some known names in the regional cinema business are struggling against it because unlike studios behind mainstream Bollywood titles, they are not exactly in a position to dictate terms with the distributors. Telugu film Manam was one of the most pirated Indian films this year. The studio behind it along with law enforcement officials have been trying to track websites which are streaming camcorder prints of the film. And on the other end, Hollywood films, for which India is one of the biggest international markets, also lose big money due to camcorder piracy. But they lose more money when they actually release blu-ray prints, because that's when the torrent sites come into play, almost annihilating the home-video business for these films. But that's a whole other story.

In the middle of this cat and mouse game, only mainstream Bollywood films seem to not get too affected by the camcorder piracy hoopla. That's mainly because their approach to movie making is pretty much like the Blitzkreig – put some heavy money in to cast stars who draw in the crowds, price the tickets for the weekends (including the opening one) relatively high, and recover almost half of the money in the first three days, even before the verdict on the quality of the movie is out far and wide.

For now, the biggest winner in India (if the fight against camcorder piracy is won) will be regional cinema studios and small time indie filmmakers—because unlike mainstream Bollywood or international studios, they have much to lose from pirates.