Movie streaming gets Hollywood steaming

THE INEXORABLE RISE of the internet and the availability of broadband has seen massive benefits for everyone from schoolkids to journalists and porn addicts.

Broadband access has allowed billions of pages of information to be beamed directly into our brains through the wonders of the eyeball-screen interface. And in recent years the World Wide Wibble has turned away from the wonders af academia and swivelled further towards entertainment.

The BBC's Iplayer may have been the first time most people have encountered full-screen streaming of video content, but the pirates are jumping on the broadbandwagon, and Hollywood is banging its corporate head against the wall trying to solve the problem of getting people to pay for its output.

Pirate movies have pretty much always been available on the Internet. Binary newsgroups were probably the first source for those not willing to wait, or pay, for the privilege of sitting in a tiny smelly, overlit cinema surrounded by twits talking to one  another, or on their mobile phones, whilst munching on overpriced, stale popcorn or slaughterhouse floor scrapings in a soggy bun.

But even though Usenet has been simplified since the days when you would hopelessly search for that last binary file of the 267 you needed to complete the download by the advent of NZB files (which take the headache out of gathering all the bits together), downloading movie files is still a long, complicated and not entirely cost-free exercise. A subscription to a newsgroup provider with decent retention times (the best have upwards of 200 days) is essential for multi GByte downloads, and the best NZB gathering sites charge a fee.

Peer to peer (P2P) services offer an alternative for budding pirates, but by their very nature they are cumbersome, agonisingly slow and depend on that most unreliable of resources... other people.

But a new breed of web sites is causing a stink in Tinseltown, the streaming pirates. And it's quite extraordinary that some of these massive, and seemingly commercial sites, have been allowed to continue to stream this content unabated.

Watchmovies.net is such a barefaced afront to the works of the industry's Mafiaa that we could barely believed our eyes as we watched a full screen stream of the as-yet-unreleaesed Kate Winslet Oscar magnet, The Reader.

OK... so the picture quality's not up to much, and the sound isn't going to blow you away, but it's free... and instant! But very, very illegal. We, of course, only watched enough of the film to confirm that it was the proper film, and then made our excuses and left.

It seems that sites like the one mentioned above do not actually host any files, simply providing a convenient front end, and links to the files on question. So even if the men in grey suits could shut down one source, each movie probably has another half a dozen sites from which it could be streamed.

According to The Independent, Hollywood watchdogs are becoming increasingly frustrated at their inability to track down, and shut down, the perpetrators. "Streaming is increasing exponentially because you don't need to download and you can watch it straight away," Eddy Leviten of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, an alliance of British and American film studios told the newspaper. "We are conducting a major investigation and are planning court actions. There are a number of sites were looking at. Streaming has become increasingly popular over the last year to 18 months.

"The problem is that the web site server may be in one territory, the person who uploads the film in another, and the site on which the film is hosted in a third, so it requires a lot of international co-operation."

With sites like Watch Movies drawing 15 million unique users a month making it one of the top 250 web sites ever, and Hollywood watchdogs struggling to track down or prove who is actually doing the illegal bit of the whole transaction, it looks like streaming piracy is here to stay, at least for the forseeable future.

Unless of course, Hollywood gets its head together in the same way as the television industry has and realises that, if we want to watch it, we want to watch it now, and in the comfort of our own homes. µ